- Coca-Cola formally announces that it doesn’t give a crap about the legal issues surrounding generative AI and it’s using it like there’s no tomorrow
- Walmart is using AI to automate the tedious negotiation with suppliers. No, you can’t do the same with your significant other. Yet.
- Somehow, JPMorgan Chase & Co is trying to decode the language used in Fed meetings to find signals to trade. Politicians next?
- Three powerful techniques to reduce the number of tokens (and your bill) in the interaction with GPT-4: The Power of No, Memory Consolidation, and Alien Language Translation
Last week, I mentioned a new perk for those members of Synthetic Work with a Sage, Innovator, and Amplifier subscription: the Best AI-Centric Tools for X (or Best For) database.
That tool is not finished yet because, first, I had to create another tool: the AI Adoption Tracker.
This is something I wanted to do for 20 years, and not just about AI but about any emerging technology I focused on during my career: a tool that tracks what organizations in what industries are using what type of AI (from what technology provider) for what use case.
Tracking the technology providers that offer a solution in a given market segment is easy. The biggest challenge is keeping up with the number during the market expansion phase, and figuring out a taxonomy that is comprehensive, easy to understand, and not prone to obsolescence after two minutes.
Everybody does that, and I did it, too, 20 years ago when I created another media project called virtualization.info. And maybe we’ll do it again here on Synthetic Work, with the appropriate differentiation, if there’s demand for it.
But what really matters to people is knowing what their peers are doing with new technologies. And if those new technologies actually work.
If you are a law firm, you want to know that other law firms are using GPT-4 to generate draft documents for complex mergers and acquisitions. And you want to know if GPT-4 actually is up to the task from those law firms rather than relying on the word of OpenAI.
This much I learned in 23 years of career, especially as a research director in Gartner and as an executive in Red Hat later on.
Another thing I learned during my 15 years in Gartner and Red Hat is that announcing the intent to use a technology is very different from actually using that technology.
End-user organizations and technology vendors announce these things all the time, as a win-win public relations strategy, to raise awareness about their brands and appear as innovators.
In reality, way too often, the products and services that are supposed to revolutionize this or that company are so mediocre that they don’t even pass the initial tests and end up quietly discarded without anybody noticing.
That’s why, the AI Adoption Tracker will only list companies that went on the record for actually using AI.
For example, last month PwC announced their intent to partner with Harvey AI to use OpenAI GPT-4 to support its 4,000 lawyers in the Legal Business Solutions division. It’s lovely, but we need some confirmation that it’s happening.
Similarly, this month PwC also announced the intent to spend $1B on OpenAI technologies by working with Microsoft. It’s lovely, too, but I’ve seen too much in my career to not be sceptical at the sentence:
Once the models are fully trained and tested, Mr. Kande sees the technology being used to quickly write reports and prepare compliance documents, analyze and evaluate business strategies, identify inefficiencies in operations or create marketing materials and sales campaigns, among many other applications.
Let’s revisit once those models are fully trained and tested and the technology is actually being used as declared, shall we?
For now, the AI Adoption Tracker includes all the companies we’ve mentioned so far in the Screwed Industries section of the Splendid Edition. Going forward, it will include all the ones I didn’t have the chance to mention yet here on Synthetic Work.
The AI Adoption Tracker is available to Synthetic Work members with a Sage, Innovator, and Amplifier membership.
Consider it in beta, as it doesn’t support mobile screens (it’s quite hard to figure out a really nice way to use a tool like this on tiny screens), so be patient as I improve it.
Hopefully, it will be useful to all of you (send me feedback by replying to this email).
The groundwork done for the AI Adoption Tracker tool will become the foundation for the Best For presentation layer and for the third tool that I plan to launch soon (that one is about prompting).
Alessandro