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Before MWC Barcelona we cautioned everybody to expect AI to be everywhere and discussed as if it were a magical unicorn to make all industry problems disappear. We cautioned people to look for people who were solving real problems and then were using AI as a tool to help assist with the solving of those problems.
After the show we reviewed what we had seen.
We now sit in a world where learning in AI has increased, and reality is more understood. And the next AI winter is approaching. AI is not cheap, and AI must solve problems that increase efficiency and/or increase revenue. There is no other driver.
But AI is a fundamental paradigm shift; it allows machines to make decisions as well as take actions. It is changing what is fundamentally possible in existing human processes. Internet companies like Rakuten have always used data to drive opportunities and efficiencies. What is new is the recent progress in Generative AI and the progress made in transformer-centric models. Cheap, large-scale compute has enabled models of billion parameter scale, and the internet has enabled training data to represent the population’s collective knowledge. This changes how humans can interact and generate documentation which changes speed, efficiency, and understanding. The best AI is the AI that augments humans rather than replacing them.
As a tease for a future article and live session, we have applied different AIs to phases of the product management software development life cycle. We will show the really good results we have experienced and which tools we have used when and where the achieve them.
In summary, AI is a game changer, AI winter is coming, but AI winners will continue to walk through that winter and feel the warmth of the summer on the other side first.
And they will never look back.
