Griffin on Tech: Living in the era of Moore’s Law squared
Last night I was in the back of a car gliding down Mission St in San Francisco with soothing jazz playing on the radio and no one sitting in the driver’s seat.
The self-driving Jaguar i-PACE from Alphabet-owned Waymo is covered in sensors, cameras, and spinning radar and lidar instruments to keep it on the roads and out of the path of other vehicles and pedestrians.
Once you get past the weird feeling of seeing the steering wheel swivelling around as though in the clutches of the Invisible Man, it feels like the most natural thing in the world to put your safety in the hands of a robot taxi.
Waymo is now racking up 100,000 rides per week in central San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix and has effectively proven it can shuttle people around safely. It isn’t a flawless system. A fellow conference-goer I met here in San Francisco told me how his Waymo ride came to an abrupt halt, literally, in the middle of the road. He got out and called 911, cars backing up behind the stalled Jaguar. Waymo’s technicians arrived with a tow truck to pick it up.
Humans in the loop
But the long-promised driverless car looks to be almost ready for prime time, at least in the US, a clear example of technology that will indeed do away with a job previously done by a human.
The Salesforce conference I’ve been at all week focused heavily on the company’s embrace of AI agents to automate tasks and perform sales and customer service functions that existing AI chatbots and copilots aren’t capable of.
Salesforce is positioning itself as the platform to deliver AI agents in a no or low code format, tapping the customer data its customers hold in the Salesforce cloud to deliver AI without data leakage and hallucinations. Will AI agents take customer service agents jobs? The mantra at this show is a familiar one of “augmentation”. Mundane roles will be automated, allowing staff to be deployed to higher value roles.
But Jim Kramer, the slightly mad host of CNBC’s Mad Money probably put the situation best when he delivered his show from Dreamforce this week. America’s service staff are burned out, he said. It’s frontline doctors are tired, overwhelmed with admin. It’s hard to find the people to do the jobs. Labour shortages are real, staff turnover high. In that environment, the US economy can use all the AI agents it can get.
Waymo or Gucci?
When quizzed in a press conference this week about AI displacing jobs, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, as he often does, reached for a scenario that’s played out with one of his customers - the luxury fashion brand Gucci, which has a large contact centre in Florence, Italy.
“We deployed our technology there, and what we found was that those Gucci agents were not only suddenly fixing those bags faster, more efficiently, but they were selling Gucci products, which they were not enabled and trained to do,” said Benioff.
“Their sales went up through that call centre 30%. The AI augmented those employees. They did not reduce any heads, they ended up with a more valuable business unit that was not only an expense centre, but a revenue centre.
“You can look at the Waymo example, there’s nobody driving the car. I think You can look at the Gucci example,” Benioff added.
Nvidia founder Jensen Huang said at the conference this week that AI development is far outstripping Moore’s Law, the principle that the speed and capability of computers can be expected to double every two years. In fact, when it comes to AI, he said, its more like Moore’s Law squared.
It’s clear we are moving beyond the copilot era of generative AI and into a phase where AI agents do more complex tasks on our behalf. Now Saleforce and its competitors who are also developing AI agents, have the task of delivering on the productivity-boosting promise of AI that has so far been too slow to materialise.
Finally, One NZ CEO Jason Paris was at Dreamforce this week too and took to LinkedIn to deliver an insightful series of notes he took away from his time in San Francisco.
They include:
- Don't hire for skills, hire for potential.
Skills can be taught but potential can't. Hire people that are ambitious, team players, resilient, have grit and are curious.
- Curiosity is the key hiring attribute
Many of these leaders talked about curiosity being the key, whether you are a formula one driver or an AI engineer.
Marc Benioff summed it up the best when he described shoshin, a Japanese proverb that means having a "beginners mindset even when you are at an advanced level”
Beginners mind = see limitless potential
Experts mind = see limited potential
- Don’t DIY AI.
Ride the AI acceleration wave and work that others with more scale and expertise have already enabled and made available.
Maximise existing AI use cases to their fullest extent and avoid creating your own.
- Speed is a critical business measure
Speed hardly ever gets measured but is increasingly a differentiator across every element of your business. Add it to your key metrics.
- Be the most trusted in your industry
If there is one thing to stand for in a fast moving AI world, its trust.
