AI is the new oil in Fortune 500 companies. Everyone is jockeying for budget to hire consultants and supervise bloated projects using commercial AI products for non-critical-path purposes, rather than developing in-house expertise at creating models with the wealth of open source tools now available and focusing on making specific models for our specific problems.
In my blue chip Fortune 250, I had heard rumors that there was a new, “agile,” internal IT group devoted to eschewing the past 30 years of stagnation, and introducing new tools and methodologies into the business. I had heard they even used Ruby on Rails for something! But I never managed to talk to anyone in the group. They had even been working on something related to AI. Now it no longer matters, as that entire group has been let go, and a whole new group has been started with new staffing.
So we continue to approach IT like it was still the 90’s, troweling layer upon layer of outsourcing and waterfall and legacy systems and processes on top of every new technology that upper management can’t avoid, due to needing to be able to say that we’re using it, in order to make public statements in the interests of the investment banks, to appear that we’re on top of the Current Thing (TM). Many people in engineering are recognizing the opportunity in front of us, and all we can do is watch as it gets treated by the organization as though it were the same as ERP or PLM, which is to say that they’re subjecting this new technology to the same years-long waterfall-and-outsourced development processes of the last 30 years.