This is another in a series of posts with excerpts from our new fiction mystery book, The AI Analyst (click on badge on left to go to the Amazon page with description, sample download, reviews etc.)
I recently posted about a next-gen technology vendor called Polestar in the book. We often forget to recognize technology buyers, but the annual CES event in Vegas usually reminds us that many of them are actually technology “switch-hitters", excellent both at sourcing technology and creating/selling tech-enabled products.
A decade ago, I observed several F500 consumer, financial and industrial companies with booths at CES. That led me to a book, The New Technology Elite. The description read “Their zip codes are far from Silicon Valley. Their SIC codes show retail, automobile or banking. But industry after industry is waking up to the opportunity of "smart" products and services for their increasingly tech-savvy customers. Traditionally technology buyers, they are learning to embed technology in their products and become technology vendors. In turn, if you analyze Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and eBay, you marvel at their data centers, retail stores, application ecosystems, global supply chains, design shops. They are considered "consumer" tech but have better technology at larger scale than most enterprises. The old delineation of technology buyer and vendor is obsolete.”
This week at CES, the trend continued with lots of auto, fintech, health and other non-IT focus. But the real showcase was Delta Airlines.
CEO Ed Bastian had an hour’s keynote at the Sphere with its stunning multi-media capabilities. He talked about GenAI, tech facilitated connections on the ground and via eVTOLs, enhanced in-flight entertainment with Sync, Sustainable Aviation Fuel and more and was joined by execs from Qualtrics, YouTube, Uber and plenty of his own colleagues. Very well done. There was much more tech on display at their large booth at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
Our new book has a next-gen technology buyer in a NYC financial institution, Sheldon Freres which knows how to monetize its mountains of unique vertical industry data. The tensions and shifts in economics between buyers and vendors of technology are brought out quite vividly in the book. As Patrick, one of the key characters in the book, summarizes at an analyst offsite
“Given how expensive GPUs and good AI talent is likely to be for the next few years, enterprises will prioritize unique products and market-insight projects, like drug discovery, mineral insights, product design advantages, trading patterns, etc. Smart customers will protect that data for themselves, train their own large language models, or LLMs, and commercialize that data asset. Vendors will continue to generate proposals, job descriptions, demand forecasts, etc. with their AI—clearly useful stuff, but not deserving significant premium pricing. We need to be associated with the first group of customers, the smart ones.”
The plot in the book involves data theft. A character in the book describes a data breach which is fraudulently used to train a vendor’s AI. He leads off with “Did you know I was in the Service? Spent a fair amount of time in the Middle East. I used to hear the expression often, ‘Who put OUR oil under THEIR sand?’ Sounded funny most of the time. Idle talk, but sometimes it sounded ominously hostile. We are going through something similar in the technology world: ‘Who put OUR data in THEIR data centers?’ There is zero respect for customer data. There’s a land grab happening. Sure you have heard The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for the unlicensed use of Times articles to train GPT large language models.”
There is a character who presents to procurement execs “For too long, technology vendors have kicked us around and gotten away with obscene margins and poor service levels. We will help you renegotiate your contracts. We will help you lobby for “right to repair” laws so you are not dependent for life on vendors you buy technology from. Even better, we will help you monetize your data assets. You deserve the status of a salesperson with a proprietary asset, not just a powerless, back office executive.”
There is plenty more “oil under our sand” metaphors in the book. There is discussion around LLMs, narrow models, KV cache in GPU RAM and robots and drones.
Don’t worry - it is a fast paced read with plenty of SV glamor and settings, not a geeky book. But read it to see why a buyer like Sheldon Freres or a vendor like Polestar is no longer fiction.
Next, I will excerpt some sections about Oxford Research and why it is a prototype for a next-gen Analyst Firm necessary to keep up with and indeed, lead next-gen buyers and vendors.
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