Beyond Infrastructure as Code: System Initiative Goes Live - “In practice, as Jacob has pointed out, this has led to unwieldy, hard-to-update and difficult-to-understand systems built on static definitions. The tools are tightly tied to a version control, making them brittle and difficult to work with. And only elite companies, such as Google, can deploy multiple times in a day with this approach as Jacob (and others) have argued."
Gemini at Work 2024: How customers use Google Cloud AI products - More on the “agent” metaphor/thought technology Gemini is using. Plus, a really great list of one-liner, enterprise AI uses cases.
IBM AI simply not up to the job of replacing staff - If the AI tools don’t work well, it’s hard to get but results. Also, the enterprise AI coding assistant needs to know a lot more than PHP.
Google Cloud rolls out new Gemini models, AI agents, customer engagement suite - Big round-up of new Gemini stuff: “agents."
How to Keep Learning at Work — Even When You Feel Fried - Enterprise Mindfulness: find out what you want to focus on and personally find valuable, then use your own motivation to structure work that fits your own goals. Also: try to have less toil/cognitive load.
Most mainframe application rewrites fail the first time - “Refactoring mainframe applications commonly results in failure on the first try, according to a Forrester survey of over 300 IT professionals commissioned by Rocket Software.” And, from the survey sponsor: ‘“Starting from scratch and rewriting the apps rarely goes well,” Buckellew said. “It can lead to massive cost overruns and it can take years. When you’re in a long rewrite project – that’s when bad things happen and projects get canceled."'
Software is cheap
And software is valuableYou want to maximize the amount of weird stuff you’re doing across the business to generate asymmetry with your competitors, with the admittedly serious caveat that the pathway to this particular ancient ruin is littered with skulls. Pay attention to the skulls. (From the HST or tech.)
Software costs very little to make, and you can rapidly try new things. As opposed to manufacturing or setting up a new Starbucks store.
Home Depot builds DIY GenAI model that tells human employees what to say - Better search/knowledge management: ‘Home Depot’s team built an LLM with RAG capabilities that answers queries by retrieving knowledge documents and processing them alongside data from previous chat history to “generate response suggestions for customer service agents."'
Embracing AI To Augment, Not Replace, The Status Quo - Ideating AI apps: ‘1. Be on the lookout for processes that don’t scale well by adding more resources, are somehow constrained by human involvement, or could be improved if the human actor had more information. 2. Once you identify the process ask yourself either “How can I improve this process?” or “What do people hate most about this process?” 3. With that information, start to triage the type of AI that could help you. If you need more scale or more specific data, start with machine learning or vision apps. If you need more summarized data or connected information, start with generative AI.'
Oscar Health’s early observations on OpenAI o1-preview - Experiments with using AI in healthcare, specially the chain of reasoning stuff in o1-preview.