How Ikea approaches AI governance - ”Around 30,000 employees have access to an AI copilot, and the retailer is exploring tailoring AI assistants to add more value. Ikea is also exploring AI-powered supply chain optimization opportunities, such as minimizing delivery times and enhancing loading sequences for shipments to minimize costs. AI in CX mostly targets personalization. // “I’m not just talking about generative AI,” Marzoni said. “There’s some old, good machine learning models that are still absolutely delivering a lot of value, if not the majority of the value to date.””
Data is very valuable, just don’t ask leaders to measure it - ”in a survey of chief data and analytics (D&A) officers, only 22 percent had defined, tracked, and communicated business impact metrics for the bulk of their data and analytics use cases… It is difficult, though: 30 percent of respondents say their top challenge is the inability to measure data, analytics and AI impact on business outcomes”
Rage Against the Machine - Perceptive: “They’re going to try two or three things they think will solve everything, which will be thrown out in court,” the official told me following the announcement of Musk’s appointment. “I assume the first thing they’ll do is some kind of hiring freeze, and then, after three months, they’ll realize agencies have started to figure out ways to get around it. And then they’ll try to stop that, and they won’t be able to do that. Then they’ll try to make people come to work five days a week, and that’s going to be difficult because a lot of these agencies don’t have offices for these people anymore. I think it’s going to be one thing after another, and maybe after four years the number of employees will be down 2 percent—maybe.”
Gartner Survey Reveals Over a Quarter of Marketing Organizations Have Limited or No Adoption of GenAI for Marketing Campaigns - ”Nearly half (47%) report a large benefit from adopting GenAI for evaluation and reporting in their campaigns.” // 77% of surveys marketing people say they’re using generative AI for marketing stuff.
Learning from examples: AI assistance can enhance rather than hinder skill development - “Decades before the advent of generative AI, the legendary UCLA baseball coach John Wooden declared that the four laws of learning are explanation, demonstration, imitation, and repetition (31). Few learners have access to the best human teachers, coaches, and mentors, but generative AI now makes it possible to learn from personalized, just-in-time demonstrations tailored to any domain. In doing so, AI has the potential not only to boost productivity but also to democratize opportunities to build human capital at scale.” // Also, some prompts used to evaluate writing quality. The one rating “easy responding” is interesting: how easy is it to (know how to) respond? Maybe good for CTAs.
OpenAI reaches 400M weekly active users, doubles enterprise customer base - SiliconANGLE - “The ChatGPT developer currently has 2 million paying enterprise users, twice as many as in September.” With “400 million active weekly users, a 33% increase from December.” And: “The New York Times reported in September that the company was expecting to end 2024 with a $5 billion loss on sales of $3.7 billion."
IBM co-location program described as worker attrition plan - From the RTO-as-not-so-stealthy-layoff files.
2025 is the breakthrough year for Generative Enterprise — and partnering with a capable services partner is critical - “[S]pending on GenAI is rising (HFS data suggests enterprise investment is rising by more than 25% on average into 2025), we start from a low base. We estimate enterprise spending on GenAI in 2024 accounted for less than 1% of global IT services spending. This is just one illustration of how far we still have to go.” // Plus, a whole bunch of commentary in enterprise AI.
A Simple Definition Of “Platform” - “a product that supports the creation and/or delivery of other products."
Inside Oracle’s New AI Agents - Moor Insights & Strategy - Getting the robot to do annual performance reviews: “Oracle is also leveraging AI to improve the performance review process itself. By aggregating and distilling information from check-ins, feedback and goal progress throughout the year, the AI agent can generate a first draft of a performance review. This should save managers time and effort while fostering a more comprehensive assessment of employee performance.” // Performance review are notoriously bullshit in the first place. What’d be interesting here is to have the robot go over the past five years and make a performance review and then compare it to what the human managers did. Which ones are (1) more correct, and, (2) better connect employee performance to organization goals (profit, growth, customer service, productivity/lower cost, etc.)