Business

Businesses are deeply confused about what AI is, and they have every right to be. Differences in terminology have plagued the Data-AI-Software landscape for many years, as anyone who has ever looked for a job as a “Data Scientist” will attest. Attempts to demystify the topic either conjure a series of analogies that are then strained to breaking point, or try to delve into the actual technology behind the hype, leaving everyone more confused than they were before.

I will attempt something different: removing the mystery by embracing the mystery.

In 2002, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos issued a memo that has entered tech industry canon. The memo, known as the “API Mandate”, is generally perceived as being a statement about technology at Amazon, and is therefore widely admired by technologists and wholly ignored by executives. This is unfortunate, because it’s no exaggeration to say that the API Mandate completely transformed Amazon as a business and laid the foundation for its success. Better still, unlike many things that global technology titans do, it is something that can be replicated and put to use by almost any business.

In this post, we’ll talk about the memo, and how it created the systems and incentives for radical organisational transformation.

Recently, Deep Learning has revolutionised a multitude of technical fields, most notably Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. The implications for business are enormous, with the ramifications of these change still filtering through the mostly technology-shy world of business. There are signs that Combinatorial Optimisation might be the next technical field to undergo Revolution-By-Neural-Network. If this comes to fruition, then the impact on business will be seismic.