The GenAI shift: moving beyond the hype

Every week there's another headline. New model, new demo, something that changes everything. Most business leaders I talk to are somewhere between impressed and alarmed, which is understandable. But neither gets you to a strategy.

This week I'm publishing three short posts for leaders who want to understand what's actually going on, without sitting through a machine learning course.

First up: what an AI model is. Not a search engine, not a database, not sentient. Not grasping the fundamentals here leads to bad decisions about where to deploy these tools and what to expect from them.

Then, why generating things is fundamentally different from finding them. Software has spent decades helping people retrieve information. GenAI does something else. That shift is where most of the practical value is hiding, and most of the confusion.

And finally, prompting. The way you communicate with these tools determines what you get out of them. That used to matter mainly to developers. It's starting to matter to everyone else too.

First one tomorrow. By the end of the week you should have enough to make a real call on where this fits in your business, and where it doesn't.