The more that things change…
It’s hard not to be a cynic as an independent industry analyst. Indeed, you are given little choice: the nature of the beast is that a bandwagon will appear, over the brow of a nearby hill, proclaiming something that (you swear) you have seen many times before as new, improved and indeed, the answer to everything.
No, it isn’t, you say. But even in doing so, you somehow validate it. “Artificial Intelligence isn’t as straightforward as that,” one might argue, in the process helping to spin up the flywheel still faster. “AI, you say? Thanks, I must take a look at that.” And thus, the job of the marketer is done.
This isn’t a bad thing in itself — tech needs its greek chorus — but at the same time, it uses up bandwidth that might be spent on the things that aren’t earning the PR dollars. Most readers will remember the Green IT wave which took up so much attention in the Noughties. Hey, guess what? Sustainable IT is still a thing, it just isn’t a marketing topic.
It also distorts reality. We are, indeed, in a wave of machine learning excitement, caused by the fact that previously unachieveable tasks are now both affordable and timely. Real-time delivery of new insights really is a thing, as are voice recognition and computer vision.
Less so is what has been termed AI, for a stack of reasons: not only that learning and inference models still need to be scoped pretty tightly, but also because they deliver useful gen to humans, not to autonomous virtual beings with the power of reason. As per a couple of recent conversations, what we currently call AI lacks the ability to discern.
But round we go. I’ve not been against taking the marketing dollar to help vendors clarify their stories, with a shrug as I face a reality in which I’m not setting the agenda. My only advice would be, sure, acknowledge the noisy topics under discussion right now, but don’t let these obscure the ones just past. Second-mover advantage really is a thing, whatever the marketers might say.