AI for Orchestrators - Newsletter #14

The latest AI insights for Business Leaders and Organisational Orchestrators.

Staccato provocation…

If “it’s in the cloud” then it’s running in a hot building somewhere, requiring a lot of energy and water…

Hello Business Orchestrators!

What does generative AI water consumption, space-based data centres, emerging patterns of employment risk, and simulation have in common? Overtly, not much, but by the end of this newsletter who knows! So lets dive in…

We’re riding a number of flywheels that are interconnected and speeding up. Our insatiable thirst for more capabilities and use cases brought on by the daily onslaught of LLM performance improvements is having a dramatic effect on our global water supplies. Some say we’ll use AI to figure out the problem, but in the meantime the build-out of big, hot and thirsty data centres running thousands of GPUs continues at pace. Boston Consulting Group has some insightful data points in the news item below.

Meanwhile, up in space, where it’s cold and sunny (on and off), science, innovation and the declining cost of getting stuff up there is a hot subject. Could data centres circling the orbit be part of the solution? I explored in it my Icelandic techno-thriller, North To Akureyri (shameless plug). Of course one of the problems/benefits with satellites is that they tend to move around quite fast. Not like earth-based data centres. Still, “clouds” in space? Axios has some interesting perspectives on AI challenges and opportunities in space below.

Back on terra firma, businesses of all shapes and sizes are harnessing/ adapting/ignoring/panicking/reacting (fill in the blank) to the various forms of generative AI that are weaving their threads into the fabric of our functional workflows, ripping up old assumptions of how things should be done, who does them, how much they cost, and do we even need to do them. Early productivity gains have released employees and teams in some traditional functions, allowing them to offload the more repetitive tasks to the bot. The evolving theory is that we can use our employees in much more higher value activities. Your correspondent has been one of the champions of this. However, a couple of points should be considered. First, that leadership and teams utilise time and the AIs to constantly re-think how they could adapt their new capacities and creativity to address new markets, produce better products or services etc. Secondly, can we keep the short-sighted reactions of some executives and stakeholders at bay. I’ve seen many organisations who would go grab those cost savings and park them in the margin bank…by cutting jobs. And third, the generative AI capabilities, combined with agent swarms, and the AI now being baked into enterprise software, will continue along their thirsty exponential trajectories, powering that flywheel of performance improvements, and potential cost saving yields. Cost savings being the employees.

Finally, to simulation. It’s been on my mind for a while, especially the ability to simulate complex environments, some of which I have described in the paragraphs above and previous newsletters. We are beginning to learn more about OpenAI’s SORA platform, including how they see it as providing potential real-world physics simulation capabilities. So perhaps the tools to allow us to plan and adapt to some of the challenges above are just round the corner.

Much to chew on, and your time, Dear Orchestrators, is precious, so let’s dive into the news!

This weeks attention grabbers:

• How to manage AI’s thirst for water - Boston Consulting Group.

• AI in space - Axios.

• Enterprise software baking in more AI workflow capabilities - VentureBeat on Salesforce.

• OpenAI’s SORA team open up about its emerging capabilities on No Priors podcast.

• Stanford are out with their 2024 AI Index. Lot’s of clues in here.

Newsletter summary:

5 questions for Leadership teams embracing GenAI:

1. Adaptation vs. Obsolescence: As generative AI reshapes workflows, how are you recalibrating your business model to capitalise on new opportunities…rather than merely cutting costs?

2. Innovation Investment: With early productivity gains from AI freeing up employee time, how is your company redirecting this capacity towards innovation and higher value activities?

3. Strategic Resilience: In the face of exponential AI integration, what strategies are you implementing to ensure your workforce evolves rather than diminishes?

4. Stakeholder Perception: How are you managing the reactionary impulses of stakeholders focused on immediate margin gains at the expense of long-term value creation?

5. Leadership Vision: How is your leadership team using AI not just as a tool for efficiency, but as a springboard for entering new markets and enhancing product or service quality?

Staccato Burst…

We can solve all of the above…

That’s all for this week. If you’re curious you can also check out more insights below on the organisational implications from applying (or not applying) GenAI.