Thanks, Bhagpuss!

The speed with which AI as a term has spread is amazing but, to me, unsurprising. There are a lot of factors pushing it that are similar to past ‘trendy’ technology terms like ‘cloud’. The key trigger seems, in my experience, to be the point that the stock market starts rewarding that term whenever it appears in company plans.

Big corporations quickly spin up their marketing machine to make sure the term appears more frequently in their business unit materials; they add a line item in their quarterly reports; and they reward sales teams and divisions for growth related to that terminology. Entire divisions that, for example, did software maintenance suddenly become ‘AI software maintenance’; the database product changes from ‘SomeDatabase’ to ‘SomeDatabase AI’. Nothing really changes under the hood, but everyone starts looking for things that are ‘close enough’ that they can be relabelled in order to chase the rewards.

It is a funny system that, if I hadn’t spent over 30 years watching it, I wouldn’t believe.