In a span of couple of years, 3 new job titles in AI space have appears. Not all survived. At first, the hot new role in AI was the prompt engineer. For a few months, LinkedIn was filled with people who had appended it to their headline. Then prompt engineering was declared dead (read this think-piece). The indispensable skill become context engineering. While prompt engineering was about “one-off tasks, content generation, format-specific outputs”, context engineering was about “conversational AI, document analysis tools, coding assistants”. The new job title is the product engineer: the person who, armed with an AI coding…
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The grand version of the semantic web didn’t happen. A narrower version of it turned out to be a good fit in regulated finance. A while back, in a piece about agents, I dropped a comment while listing the technologies that have each had a turn (e.g., expert systems, neural nets, rule engines): “Ontologies (remember those? Well… it’s coming back. That’ll be a separate blog).” This is that blog. 2 different things travel under the word “ontology,” and only one of them has a future. There’s the ambitious one: formal logic, automated reasoning, machines inferring facts nobody stated. And, there’s the…
The industry is building agents even for deterministic workflows and that’s a mistake. It feels a lot like the dot-com era, when everyone rushed to establish an online presence without questioning why, and we all know how that turned out. There is a meeting happening right now, in some conference room or some Zoom grid, where a perfectly reasonable process (the one with simple decision point, a lookup table, and a decade of stable behavior) is about to be rebuilt as an “agentic” system. Someone said the word agentic out loud, and the room nodded, because nodding at agentic is what rooms do in…
I’ve lived through 25+ years of technology hype cycles, and what they (and don’t) tell us about the one we’re living through now. There is a particular kind of meeting that happens in technology organizations at the peak of every hype cycle. The room is full of smart people. There is a slide deck. Someone presents a technology that is going to change everything; not incrementally, not in some narrow domain, but fundamentally, at the root, in ways that will render existing patterns of working obsolete within a measurable timeframe. The questions from the room range from credulous to breathless.…
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. – Charles Goodhart There is a moment, in the life of every flawed metric, when it stops measuring the thing you care about and starts measuring how badly people want to look good on it. That moment is invisible while it’s happening. You only see it in the rear-view mirror, usually after the budget meeting where someone asks why costs tripled and outcomes didn’t move. This week, 4 of the largest technology companies on earth hit that moment more or less simultaneously (read the article on thestreet.com),…