Prompt: “An AI humanoid CEO in a conference room with a long table and windows with other human executives men and women sitting in a meeting and listening”. Using the new Bing Image Creator powered by DALL-E
It’s clear now: we’ve firmly entered the Age of AI. As Bill Gates writes, “The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone. It will change the way people work, learn, travel, get health care, and communicate with each other. Entire industries will reorient around it. Businesses will distinguish themselves by how well they use it.”
The founding of the Internet and the web, digitizing, collecting, and storing data, building up cloud infrastructures, and developing modern languages, API, and microservices architecture have all been key ingredients in delivering the advances in AI that we are now experiencing. How organizations move forward will depend on where they want to end up and how quickly they want to get there. Also how fast others get there.
TLDR: Adoption of AI is not optional and also not a wait-and-see playbook that was used during the cloud adoption curve. Organizations must examine their current organization model, engagement model, operating model, economic model, technology choices and capabilities, talent and primarily how they have established data & analytics functions to reposition them for the Age of AI.
The real question is: Are organizations / enterprises ready to meet the AI moment or will it slip by like Cloud?
Prompt: “AI is eating Data, Data is eating the Cloud, the Cloud is eating Software, software is eating the world, anime cartoon.” Using the new Bing Image Creator powered by DALL-E
Marc Andreesen used the phrase “Software is eating the world” to poetically describe the disruption that software companies were bringing to traditional enterprises. During that time and since then, technology and particularly enterprise technology experienced many cycles. Micro services and APIs powered by new software architectures led to decomposition of monolithic systems and opened the door for integration of services. Cloud computing enabled new infrastructure and services to support rapid scale of compute and storage. Data creation exploded and took advantage of low cost storage and cloud to house vast amounts of data and brought along with it a host of new challenges on how to manage data. Now AI is here to take advantage of it all!
Prompt: “Business people carrying a briefcase chasing clouds, digital art”. Using the new Bing Image Creator powered by DALL-E
A critical hot take: A generalization of course, but from my experience and observing enterprises, the opportunities and benefits were not realized. Organizations were hesitant to adopt the cloud at the start - waiting to see where it went, waiting to see what others were doing, debating the risks, prioritizing private cloud offerings, consolidating data centers, generating enthusiasm within their developer community and going hot-and-cold on their cloud strategies. Cloud clearly wasn’t as much of a differentiator or an urgent endeavor for large enterprises as it was for startups and fintechs. [related] Large enterprises used their on-premise implementations as their crutch. The lack of imagination of what new offerings they could build on the cloud diluted the value proposition of going to the cloud. Cloud became an “IT thing” when it should’ve been a “Business thing”. The investment to rearchitect their IT applications and reimagine their business was too expensive and the typical enterprise execution cycle too long to make it viable. Roughly 20 years have passed since Cloud computing took hold and enterprises have little to show for it.
As is already demonstrated by how quickly and widely ChatGPT was adopted and the rapid rise (weeks and days, not months and years) of new varieties of Large Language Models and other Generative AI models as well as a vibrant and emerging ecosystem of 3rd party products, the pace of AI innovation is only going to increase. Adoption is not optional!
What does this mean for enterprise adoption and readiness? What lessons can be learned from the Cloud adoption stories?
Welcome to the AI panel discussion. I have with me today 3 special guests who are well known in their fields - Sage (chatbot in Poe built on GPT 3.5-turbo), Bard (Google’s LaMDA based chatbot), Claude+ (Anthropic’s newest chatbot) and GPT-4 (OpenAI’s latest version of GPT)- to share their unique insight on AI adoption.