I overheard an interesting conversation while having dinner recently. Two gentlemen at the next table were talking about their teenage sons and what they should do after school. One of them said that with AI now, there was no longer any need for their children to go to university. I don’t share that view. But…
Amazon’s decision to block Meta’s Muse AI assistant from shopping on its platform caught my attention. Amazon says Meta had not obtained permission for Muse to access its store, that the agent did not identify itself while browsing, and that there were concerns about how customer credentials and account information could be handled. The dispute…
When companies start thinking seriously about AI, one question inevitably comes up. Which jobs could AI eventually replace? I understand why people ask it. AI can now perform tasks that, only a few years ago, we assumed required a person. But particularly for Malaysian SMEs, I don’t think that’s a very useful place to start….
In my previous post, I wrote about using chatbot conversations as a source of customer intelligence. Every enquiry contains signals. What customers are interested in. What they’re struggling to find. What they repeatedly ask about. And sometimes, how close they may be to making a buying decision. But collecting customer intelligence is only useful if…
A chatbot is usually deployed for a fairly straightforward reason. Customers have questions. The chatbot answers them. If it can handle repetitive enquiries quickly and accurately, customers get an immediate response and employees spend less time answering the same questions again and again. That’s already useful. But we’ve been exploring another source of value sitting…
Kodak came up during a team discussion today. We were talking about how a company that gave the world the iconic idea of the “Kodak Moment” could subsequently struggle with the transition to digital photography. There’s an interesting irony in the story. Kodak wasn’t blindsided by digital photography. One of its own engineers developed an early digital…
We recently encountered an interesting problem with an AI bot we had built for a client. The system had been working well. Then something changed. New data was introduced into the system, but some of that information conflicted with data that had previously been manually entered into its context database. Suddenly, the AI had two…
In my previous post, I wrote about why asking whether ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini is better is really the beginning of a much larger conversation. The model matters, of course. But it is only part of what determines the quality of the answer you eventually get. At a basic level, I think there are three…
I’m old enough to remember the browser wars. In fact, at one point in my career, I actually sold Netscape browser licences. There was Netscape Navigator. Then Internet Explorer arrived. People debated which browser was faster, which was better and which would eventually dominate. I also remember another technology debate from that era. How many…
Following the previous post, I had a conversation with a client about assessing his company’s AI needs. He asked me a very practical question: “When should I train my people to use AI, and when should I build an AI system?” I thought it was a good question. Because once you move beyond the excitement…
