Daily Inspiration: “A strategy based upon just the technology is not a strategy. It’s a distraction!”

“A strategy based upon just the technology is not a strategy. It’s a distraction!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

There is an imbalance in the technology/strategy universe.

Carroll’s Law of Accelerated Imbalance

When the pace of development and availability of new software vastly outstrips the ability of people and organizations to deal with it

That’s where we are with AI at this very moment, and it is fastening to watch!

How fast is AI moving? A few weeks ago I mentioned a Website that didn’t exist 6 months ago – that featured 5,500+ AI tools.

Oh, wait, that was two weeks ago. I just checked it again on Monday when I did a mailout to my speaker bureau partners, and it’s up to 9,000!

This morning, 3 days later, it’s up to 9,500 tools.

The site is a useful resource that leads to a vast variety of mostly personal AI tools – stuff having to do with productivity, scheduling, video, audio, and design. It’s indicative of the number of new startups built around fascinating new ideas to exploit the sudden new arrival of tools around ChatGPT, text-to-image, text-to-video, and yes – text-to-music tools.

And so, for example, I now have access to the Google AI “Test Kitchen”, and can do a simple text-to-music command. So here I’ve asked for “An inspirational synth beat to align people with tomorrow, today” – and got this:

We are witnessing the emergence of magic – but, there is so much happening it is difficult to keep track of!

On the corporate side, the same thing is happening. My attention was drawn to a post on LinkedIn from someone I follow from the software company SAP; it was about their new AI-related software releases, which are being featured in their global Sapphire product updates this week.

Timo commented:

Unsurprisingly, one of the first big topics was the rise of Artificial Intelligence. SAP has been embedding AI into lots of different areas for many years now, in areas like logistics, finance, travel receipts, etc. A lot of this is already taken for granted because “it just works”. But of course the latest technology changes mean new business opportunities, and the main SAP AI product page has been updated to include new AI application examples and messaging.

He referenced SAP’s new AI roadmap.

A new Generative AI Roadmap page and a more detailed blog post give some examples of how generative AI can benefit existing business workflows, including helping deal with freight documentation (in SAP Transportation Management), write job descriptions (in SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting), or find best-matching processes (in SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite).

Most every other major corporate software vendor -the folks who build the stuff that runs the corporate world – have a similar marketing story and spin, and have been busy with a similar integration of AI technologies into their products. But suddenly, it’s the marketing buzzword du jour. In other words, we are now in the era of ALL AI, ALL THE TIME.

The result? The word ‘overwhelmed’ is quickly coming to define anything having to do with AI – new stuff is coming at us at a blistering pace, and organizations and executives are feeling like they exist in an absolute firehose of new ‘stuff.’  This means that, essentially, we are here:

It’s always interesting to watch when Carroll’s law comes into play, and the excessive hysteria outstrips the ability of organizations to deal with the opportunity. It never ends well for a time, until we get to the Plateau of Productivity. Don’t get me wrong – there is something fundamentally transformative occurring here, and this is one of the most seismic, disruptive trends to have occurred in decades. It IS comparable to the arrival of the Internet and the disruptive steamrollering of industries which then ensued over the next three decades. It’s just happening… faster.

That’s why I’ve positioned myself with my AI-focused website to offer ‘strategic clarity’ – the insight that CEOs and association executives need to provide their teams. There’s a lot of tremendously exciting stuff going on, but without linking it to a strategic purpose, organizations will end up spinning their wheels. The concept is getting a great response – executives don’t want toys, they want clarity; they want to cut through the confusion; they want to transition from feeling overwhelmed to being in control.

I keep adding new material to my AI-focused website and encourage you to visit on occasion to see what’s new. It’s at https://jimcarroll.ai.

What an exciting time to be a futurist!