Enterprise hits and misses - AI hype, retail upheaval and world-changing tech
- Summary:
- This week: AI hype and ethics vs automation. Retailers respond to Amazon's dominance. Emerging tech is about purpose, not convenience. And: a guest whiff.
Lead story - Navigating the AI hype - and ethical minefield by Chris Middleton and Gary Flood
myPOV: The AI truth-or-hype circus is in full swing. Diginomica scribes must apply raised eyebrows and rabid research to reduce the noise, which was Chris Middleton's aim in Navigating the AI ethical minefield without getting blown up. Middleton works his way through a significant new AI report: "For vendors and their customers, AI is the new must-have differentiator. Yet in the context of what the report calls “unrealistic enthusiasm” about it, the need to understand AI’s social impact is both urgent and overwhelming."
Though it's not quite enterprisey, the FBI's fascinating/disconcerting project of analyzing prison tattoos with computer vision shows just how quickly machine learning can cross lines. Middleton warns that the nasty combo of confirmation bias in research and social prejudices are bad ingredients for machine learning. Narrow talk of automation and productivity gains won't address these issues.
Not that productivity gains are a bad thing, which Gary Flood explores on diginomica/government in Don’t Add Needlessly To The AI Hype – Reform Group. Personalized services are the appealing side, but as Flood cautions: "Applying AI to public services means applying algorithms to an area of high risk because it will have an impact on people’s lives."
Ergo, let's have the productivity and ethics conversations at the same time: during the AI design and policy stage. Bonus: also check Chris' The rise of the BritBot - UK Robotics Week highlights AI progress.
Other diginomica highlights:
Amazon retail fallout - cautious optimism is the watchword. As the retail industry digests the Whole Foods acquisition with all the joy of a raw kale salad, diginomica's retail coverage pointed to cautious optimism in Amazon's shadow:
- Nike cautiously partners with Amazon, but keeps DTC digital focus on track - Stuart notes that Nike.com and Nike apps just passed the $2 billion revenue mark, not shabby. And now: a frenemies partnership with Amazon.
- Magento CEO - ‘Amazon changed the game, but retailers should be optimistic’ - Derek chats with an e-commerce player with big ambitions, and a
gentle thwack in the posteriorpep talk for retailers: compete on customer experience. Me: easier said than done, Amazon's CX is pretty damn good. - Amazon looms large as Sainsbury's and Ocado rise and fall - Stuart with a UK angle on Amazon's Whole Foods move, where Whole Foods does not have major presence. But - clocks are ticking.
Vendor analysis, diginomica style. Here's my three top choices from our vendor coverage:
- Five takeaways from PepsiCo on moving SAP HR to the cloud - Phil with a fresh SAP SuccessFactors use case. Tips cover everything from leadership to standardization to post go-live. I like PepsiCo's "fasten your seat belts" line much better than the typical cloud-is-wondermuss platitudes.
- CustomInk prints better results with Workday - Den with a nifty story of a move from "SME" to enterprise-grade. "QuickBooks to Workday AND replaced HR plus payroll all on one go" - you don't hear that every day, eh?
- Nutanix – inside out, not outside in, but heading for invisibility - One of several Nutanix updates, this one from Martin, with Nutanix positioning itself as key to cloud transitions: "Nutanix understands that their legacy of technological debt cannot be wished away and has to be used as their collective start point."
A few more vendor picks, without the quips:
- Twilio packages conversational engagement for enterprise devs - Phil
- Apttus CEO on poly partnering with Salesforce and Microsoft - Phil
- Low code means no code on the Appian way - Martin
Jon's grab bag - I have a stump speech on the need for flexible/continuous learning but never see enough use cases. Mark Samuels has one in Ayrshire College uses virtualisation as a platform for flexible learning. Barb Mosher Zinck accepts no excuses in Stop procrastinating and get moving on video marketing (spot-on, the tools are accessible - what matters most is the content).
Given I routinely hammer other publications for extravagant headlines, we probably went a bit too far with Can Michael Bloomberg save American cities with data at the core? But - Jerry's made a good case for Bloomberg's pro bono efforts to help American cities get up to speed on data services, even if Michael Bloomberg doesn't (supposedly) kiss babies. Finally, Stuart is at his unsparing best in Europe just made a big protectionist mistake with its latest Google ruling, dishing out "Silicon Envy" and warning against tit-for-tat protectionism.
Best of the rest
Lead story - These are the top 10 emerging technologies of 2017by Oliver Cann, World Economic Forum
myPOV: If you're like me, you're permanently bloated and oversaturated all set with "emerging technologies" posts that are breathless advertisements for the smart data machines that will bring us every convenience. That's why this World Economic Forum tech review is welcome. Their list adheres to that old-fashioned idea that the focus of tech should actually be to solve vexing societal problems, not serve up perfectly-browned toast.
The WEF anticipates tech like "liquid biopsies" (a step forward in the fight against cancer), harvesting clean water from air, genomic vaccines, sustainable community design - with no mention of Facebook, hotel booking apps, intelligent dental floss, planes with standing-only passengers, or pizza drone delivery. Enterprise keynote planners could learn a thing or two from WEF. Would you rather hear a guest keynote on how tech is changing the fight for cancer, or a guest celebrity on "climbing the mountaintop"?
Honorable mention
- Event Report - Salesforce TrailheaDX - AI, Events and more - Holger Mueller donned the red shoes and Constellation jacket for Saleforce's developer gig. 5,000 participants show ecosystem health but Mueller does raise (aging) platform concerns.
- Stay Out of Security Breach Headlines: 3 Things That Must be Addressed in your Cloud Agreement - UpperEdge has been the best blog source of customer contract advice for a few years now. Bonus points for not tacking on their usual aggressive sales pitch at the end of the post.
- MongoDB's Return to Its Data Management Roots - This New Stack post brings out MongoDB's significant shift: back to the original vision of a data management platform after an eight year focus their NoSQL database.
- New York Times newsroom walks out as editors, reporters decry direction of paper - One of numerous digital media stories that hit my scouring eyes this week, all of which pointed to business model struggles impacting even the deepest pockets (via reader Frank Scavo).
- In Towns Already Hit by Steel Mill Closings, a New Casualty: Retail Jobs - Speaking of disrupted industries: "Even as e-commerce grows, it isn't absorbing these jobs."
- Women in Tech Speak Frankly on Culture of Harassment - We've heard this sad and, alas, necessary refrain many times before, but this time it's from the angle of female-founded startups.
Whiffs
Good to know: if you're going to be an insufferable @ssclown on Facebook, you can get your pending acceptance to Harvard permanently revoked. Elsewhere in social foot-in-mouth, sportswriter Andy Gray got roundly spanked for his
Stop me if you've heard this one before, but Microsoft has an AI chatbot that is as good at being prejudiced as the humans it interacts with (Microsoft’s Chatbot Zo Calls The Qur'an Violent And Has Theories About Bin Laden).
I have yet to hear back from Forrester's George Colony on my request that he "pass the pipe":
Apple Should Buy IBM https://t.co/we1cRglXGE -> there's a difference between counter-intuitive and just plain nuts #passthepipe
— Jon Reed (@jonerp) July 1, 2017
Anti-whiff: Hats off to Without Bullshit's Josh Bernoff, who called a whiff on himself in blunt/effective fashion: (I apologize for yesterday's blog post about Dave McClure). Finally, hits/misses regular Clive Boulton chimes in with a whiff pick of his own, involving the Google News redesign (Google News website gets redesigned, now looks like something from this decade). Many Ars Technica readers objected to the redesign, as did Boulton, who said to me:
He doubled down:
What do readers think? I'm not fond of the new design. I find Google takes A/B design testing to a brute force extreme, with a long and tedious history of alienating so-called "super users" like myself that prefer old school layouts I can manipulate, rather than new school mobile simplicity. Ars Technica reader "wildsman" is thinking along similar lines:
What the hell is Google thinking? This new design looks like Google+ came and threw up on Google News.
Nice note to wrap on - see you next time.
This is a truncated "Jon feels the road burn" version of hits and misses, which by definition excludes some worthy content - from diginomica and beyond. If you read an #ensw piece that qualifies, let me know in the comments as Clive always does.
Most Enterprise hits and misses articles are selected from my curated @jonerpnewsfeed. 'myPOV' is borrowed with reluctant permission from the ubiquitous Ray Wang.