Three Shifts Coming to AI in the Next 12 Months

Three major shifts are reshaping AI: value moves from models to harnesses, frontier LLMs become commodities, and intelligent systems evolve into networks of specialized agents. Explore seven data-driven predictions on enterprise AI, open-source models, document workflows, and the future of AI infrastructure.

What I Learned by Developing a Top Alexa Skill.

Top 1% of Skills There are over 160,000 Alexa skills available worldwide. Amazon does not publish rankings or engagement scores, but reviews are visible on the site. Voicebot estimates that less than 1% of skills receive more than 100 ratings. My Skill Tarot Reader is a game / educational tool. Users can have their Alexa explain specific tarot…

No One Wants To Talk To Your Chatbot

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to talk about this thing called chat. Electric word, “chatbot”. It means automation of human interactions, and that’s a mighty cost-effective thing. But I am here to tell you, no one wants to talk to your chatbot. So before you call up your programmers, and ask them about ChatGPT….

Comparing Different LLM Models For Data Extraction

A lot of human and computer processing time is spent getting data from one format to another. Many processes defy automation because they run on a long tail of unstructured data, human text, and documents designed for printing. The explosion of AI and large language models (LLMs) opens the door to fully automated data extraction…

Big Data Is Not Enough

Originally posted to LinkedIn on Aug 25, 2014 You Don’t Want to Need Big Data Janitors When Big Data hit the scene, technologist told us to throw away our databases, our spreadsheets, and our models. This was a brave new world where simply having tons of data would answer everything. A 2008, Wired article prognosticated “The End…

My Day At Bletchley Park

Bumph Place I think that I shall never see A sight so curious as BP, This place called up at war’s behest, And peopled by the strangely dressed; Yet what they do they cannot say, Nor ever will ’til Judgement Day. For six long years we have been there, Subject to local scorn and stare. We…

Jira: Epics, Sub-Epics, and Story Points

I love Jira, probably more than I should, but the difficulty in tracking progress and breaking down work to mirror my teams kills me. The new Greenhopper 6.2 and the “edit in place” fields made a big difference, but I still needed a couple of things: A way to groups a bunch of Epics together…

How Software Estimates Fail Part 4: Lots of Little Estimates

Last week we talked about how easily estimates go wrong when you try to make giant ones up front, but they can also fail easily when you try to add up lots of small ones. Once again, it comes down to simple math and how optimistic we are about our planning. If I were to…