In the mid-1990s, I was on a small Intel team building WIINGS, an indirect-inventory system for factory stores. We were told an ERP rollout would replace it within a year. Decades later, its core logic still runs, largely untouched, while the UI evolved around it. For two decades, enterprises outsourced differentiation to SaaS in the…
At an Intel leadership conference, our then-CIO Diane Bryant ran a lateral-thinking exercise – List every use case you can think of for a motel-room wire hanger. Twenty of us in the room struggled to get past three to five and a couple of sharper thinkers hit ten. She then shared that when the same…
If you haven’t caught on yet, meet ‘vibe coding,’ popularized by AI researcher Andrej Karpathy in a tweet that hit over 4 million views. I won’t try to do it justice in a paraphrase as the term has since taken on a life of its own. I can only pity the developers who took the…
AI agents are the new shiny toy, and it feels a lot like the LLM hype from two years ago. Plenty of ‘experts’ are now touting agents as the endgame of AI, the same way they once touted LLMs as the dawn of sentient machines. I recently read an article claiming a wave of unicorn…
The narrative keeps repeating itself, the way all narratives eventually do. You’ll be replaced by AI or replaced by someone who knows how to use it. In short, you’re supposedly cooked unless you jump on the bandwagon. The fearmongering mostly produces a workforce that learns to use chatbots and believes that alone is a competitive…
2025 should be the year of rapid enterprise AI adoption. Enterprises still running a wait-and-watch strategy will spend the year watching competitors eat their market share. The time to move is now. The real barrier isn’t the technology, it’s the CxO’s dilemma of figuring out what problem it solves and what the ROI is. Most…
Back in Feb 2023 when ChatGPT hype was at its peak, I was asked about what I thought about this thing called artificial intelligence. My immediate response was that this is the beginning of dumbification of humanity. As AI continues to make inroads into our lives, my opinion on this has gotten stronger over the…
I was listening to Lex Fridman’s podcast episode with Dario Amodei and the Anthropic team on AGI and the future of humanity. The creators of AI seem to feel obligated to talk about the risk of AI going berserk, and their efforts to align it to guardrails meant to minimize that imagined, hyperbolic risk. To…
One reliable sign that a technology’s hype is ebbing is that the coverage turns pragmatic, less hyperbolic, and stops recycling the same three talking points. I’ve seen those green shoots on AI in recent months. My read is that most enterprises have run their POCs and pilots and are now genuinely asking what AI can…
An idea I floated in an earlier post on the moral imperatives of AI about reskilling workers displaced by automation later surfaced in Indian government policy discussions. It also came up again, unprompted, in a recent keynote I gave for the PMI Chapter of Gujarat – will my job be replaced by AI? Technological shift…