Arriving at ‘Hello World’ in enterprise AI - The (slow) nature of digital transformation hits AI like a sack of bricks in the face. The brick avoidance techniques are the same as always, a duel approach: (1) sell a “business outcome” to execs, a measurable improvement to either making money or cutting costs (2) enable developers to smuggle in AI that is then more costly to get rid of than to accept. Each takes years to build up to big revenue. Is this bad? Not for the enterprise natives.
Why saying "please" is nice and pineapple skin, AI edition
The AI Wired Parent“Why is saying ‘please’ nice?” my five year old daughter asked. Being a dad, I got excited to explain a simple thing in detail, “well,” I started. “No, let’s ask the circle!” and by that she meant voice mode in ChatGPT.
So we did: “Well, saying ‘please’ is kind of a way to show respect and appreciation when you’re asking someone for something. It just helps to make the interaction a bit more polite and friendly, which usually makes people more willing to help you out.
VMware Tanzu CIO Checklist for Safer and More Scalable AI Application Delivery - If you’re doing some enterprise AI strategamagizing, here is a good list of things to ponder and pester your direct reports about.
Frequently Asked Questions (And Answers) About AI Evals - “the projects we’ve worked on, we’ve spent 60-80% of our development time on error analysis and evaluation. Expect most of your effort to go toward understanding failures (i.e. looking at data) rather than building automated checks."
A consumption basket approach to measuring AI progress - “In contrast, actual human users typically deploy AIs to help them with relatively easy problems. They use AIs for (standard) legal advice, to help with the homework, to plot travel plans, to help modify a recipe, as a therapist or advisor, and so on. You could say that is the actual consumption basket for LLM use, circa 2025.” // Also, interesting aside that maybe AI is as good as it’ll get (in a good way).
Air France-KLM to increase intelligence of bots that have saved 200,000 hours - Four or five AI uses cases - maybe even agentic! - from the airline I fly.
“We’re gonna show, the young people, how to have an effective 30 minute meeting.”
Perfect FoodsPerfect foods: traditional Tex-Mex refried beans; bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast taco; pad thai with tofu; instant ramen noodles; Dutch fries with mayonnaise; sharp cheddar cheese; salted butter (aka, European butter); peanut butter, chunky; HEB tortillas; kibbling; coffee; queso with all the stuff in it; (OK, OK: all of Tex-Mex); USDA steak, cooked rare.
Great episode.Wastebook“and then [for] three minutes you wait for it to be done, gazing out the window contemplating the gentle breeze on the leaves, the distant hum of traffic, the slow steady unrelenting approach of that which comes for us all.