Do We Have What it Takes?
Been thinking a lot about generative AI and its implications. How can we not? The onslaught is everywhere. Each day we scan the headlines of more than 10,000 companies in our industry and make the top 10 available; the remaining are databased for our paid clients so they can track companies — whether competitors or for buyers and investors — track their portfolio of data, information, and analytics vendors.
AI in the press is like a tsunami. Anyone old enough to remember the dot.com bubble and bust will remember when .com was on every press release, company name, marketing piece — adding it brought instant valuation cred.
Then came search, vertical search, and of course, SaaS and mobile. Remember when everyone had to have an app? Today, it’s AI — and separating the wheat from the chaff on what’s marketing babble and what’s real is a full-time job. Right now, we are working on a whole series on generative AI use cases. See the first two here and here and stay tuned for the rest in the series.
And around all the marketing hype is the real need for market education. For considering real issues like:
- What jobs will be lost, which new ones will be created, and how do we make sure it’s a net gain for people through re-training? Universal income? I don’t think that’s the answer the technocrats hype. They want the billions while everyone else takes home $10,000 a year. Hmmm, I don’t think so.
- What happens when the next UI is no UI, a phenom we predicted years ago in our annual Outsell Information Industry Outlook. Already, we are seeing voice as an interface to serious business workflow solutions where a voiced question yields search and display. Siri and Alexa have been doing this for years; but what happens when it’s professional workflow applications?
- As a group of clients said in one of our leadership council meetings: What happens to apprenticing and how will professionals become experts in their field if the first layer/entry levels of apprenticing is done by a machine?
- How do we influence regulation while innovating responsibly and swiftly? We need driver’s licenses and certifications to do certain things in our lives. The food we consume and the cosmetics we wear have to be labeled with ingredients handled in certain ways. How do we ensure the knowledge we consume is handled as safely?
- What does it mean to really be “a data first” company? As someone said to me last week, maybe that really means companies need data-first leadership. 😊
- What policies are we using, and what guardrails do we have in place for our own company playbooks?
There is work to be done by industry associations, companies in the learning space, and each of our businesses. Each of us has a role to play, especially in information services and content-enabled tech, where the very essence of what we do is to inform, educate, and help people make better decisions.
If we really believe in justice, innovation, discovery, education, health, sustainability, transparency, and all the things our industry actually DOES; we have to lead the way as an industry to answer these questions and drive for lasting and impactful change.
This one we have to get right. The stakes of bad data, biased data, incomplete data, and the bad decisions that come off it are simply too high. We’ll be exploring these and more topics at the Outsell Signature Event co-produced with JEGI-Clarity October 3–4. Do we have what it takes?