Large organisations have always struggled with having an agreed, corporate-wide set of data for things that cross organisational boundaries: customers, products, locations, assets etc. A dedicated multi-billion-dollar software market, master data management (MDM), grew up to address this issue. Why is it so hard to get a single list of customers or products? The average…
When an AI agent is asked to keep an email secret from another user, you would hope that it would find a way of doing this without destroying the email server, but you would be disappointed. The field of artificial intelligence (AI) is moving from chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude to “agentic AI”, whereby AI…
Agentic AI is the most fashionable area of AI at the moment. Moving beyond chatbots that answer questions or generate text or images, the idea of agentic AI is to equip AI with resources and a degree of free will (“agency”). A chatbot can advise you on planning a holiday and recommend flights, hotels and…
For the last three years or so, generative AI, powered by large language models (LLMs) have been pushed by vendors and consultants as the ultimate automation tool. Previous waves of AI have struggled to make a lasting impact outside of niche applications, as IBM found out with its Watson AI tool. A much-publicised flagship Watson…
Large language models (LLMs) have been heavily promoted as productivity tools for enterprises in a range of use cases, such as customer chatbots, content creation for marketing material, and enabling employees to easily access and summarise documents like product documentation or product manuals. There are other use cases, such as automation of business processes like…
Most articles about artificial intelligence (AI) today discuss its capabilities and potential for innovative applications, from chatbots to predictive maintenance in engineering. What is less well explored is the cost of delivering these projects, and even less well addressed is the issue of supporting an AI model once it is already in production use. We…
Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have excellent linguistic skills, but to use them for a specific business process, they need additional knowledge. For example, a customer service chatbot would not be much use unless it knew things like the products that the company sold and who had purchased them and when. To supplement…
What is best practice for organisations deploying AI in the enterprise? In this blog we examine the organisation, governance, architecture, processes, culture and technology needed for effective AI deployment. To begin with, an organisation needs to consider why it is considering deploying AI in the first place, just as it would with any new technology.…
You may be aware that a large language model (LLM) is trained on data, but did you know that there is a multi-billion-dollar industry of human data labelling that supports this? Behind every LLM lies an invisible workforce that toils away, labelling files, images and videos to help train the AIs. A large language model…
I saw a disturbing image today. Not something from a war zone or a horror film, but a post on Linkedin: Microsoft have, in their wisdom, introduced a large language model (LLM)-driven AI helper to Excel called Copilot. After entering “=copilot( )”, you can type in any text you like within the brackets, and Excel…