Innovation such as AI follows a Value and Hype Cycle.

OpenAI’s new model Orion is reportedly not as big of a step forward as the previous models. This has caused a lot of questions being raised about a potential AI bubble as well as a general increased skepticism towards AI.

This is to be expected, and the continuous exponential growth of the core technology is not the primary factor to drive AI innovation going forward.

I’ve been privileged to spend some of my time working with insights, analytics, decision intelligence / BI for many years now, all with the mission of helping people make better decisions. Here are some light reflections/insights about some of my observations to date. Hope helps ❤

1) What problem/decisions we try to solve for are often not sufficiently specific

2) Call to actions are often missing

3) Data quality and availability remains a major challenge

4) Many people don’t care enough about the truth

5) Diversity of data is important

Your success depends on two things: Luck and your decisions. As such, decision intelligence is very important. Despite this importance, many organizations are unclear about what their most important decisions are. To make the most of things such as AI analytics, we need to get clear about what decisions we are looking to make.

In business, we are almost always looking to grow. Whether you’re a startup, a large global company, or a B2B sales person. It really doesn’t matter. We are all looking to grow. Since this doesn’t seem to change any time soon, the question I’m asking myself is what it would take to make the growth sustainable, and not just from a planetary perspective, but from a holistic perspective?

If someone honks at you in traffic, or sends you an angry email, or posts something on social media contrary to your political beliefs - what do you do? Being respectful to others is really really hard work, but I would argue that it’s very important that we put in the work if we are serious about contributing to a better society.

Most innovation follows a hype cycle of some sort. AI is no different. Today, AI is almost everywhere to be found as a discussion topic. Many governments, companies, organizations and individuals are investing a lot of energy in AI. Many of them will be short-term disappointed by the lack of immediate measurable impact and significant progress, and by things being more than a little bit more complex than originally anticipated. This said, AI will help accelerate several important conversations. Three important conversations I find very interesting are: Society: What do we want? Organizations: How solid is our innovation process? Individuals: What is my unique value-add?

As we approach the peak shopping holiday season and Black Friday, consider how you relate to shopping and what you want to spend your money on. Here are three things you can consider to ensure that how you spend your money will contribute to the wellbeing of yourself and others, including a couple of specific tips for Black Friday.

Engaging in a discussion around if AI generated images should be allowed to be used in news media, or if grades should be introduced earlier in school, both become very hard unless you’ve first agreed what you want to achieve with news media and school. As a society we need to create ways of working that enables us to better align what we want to achieve. The importance of this will accelerate with the growth of AI, since if we are not clear about what we want to achieve, what will we tell AI to do?

What the acceleration of AI really does is put to the test how strong innovation strategy companies have and how strong learning habits individuals have. Here are some thoughts on how you can approach it with the help of a so called Learning Agenda.

As we continue to accelerate AI and technological development and want to align that to our values, we need to make a clear choice in society if we want empathetic to be a value of ours or not. Today it’s not. I believe it should. Empathetic communication is much harder than non-empathetic communication, but it adds so much more value to society. I want to encourage you to approach any topic you are facing at home, at work, on social media or elsewhere by only asking questions for a while. See what happens. I also want to challenge all social media platforms to make it easier to create empathetic comments and posts by building it out as a tool next to emojis. Take care.