Digital Wire: Digital business, digital transformation, APIs, AI and payments

If we listen to the media, business leaders, and the press, we should be getting behind the AI wagon because of its potential to automate many of the processes everyday companies struggle with. I don’t dismiss this notion entirely because I think it’s true if you have the ability to integrate this technology in a meaningful way. For example, the startup company " scrambl " (full disclosure, I’m a minority investor) is making use of gen-AI by "understanding" CVs (curriculum vitae) from applicants and identifying the skills to match them to open positions. This works great – I have seen this in action, and while there are some misses, most of that "normalization of skills" works. There are other promising examples, such as Q&A systems to understand the documentation of a complex environment. When combined with RAG ( retrieval augmented generation ), this has the potential to significantly reduce the time it takes to make complexities understandable. But ...

As many have during the summer, I have taken a break and did some reading. To my amazement, I have seen the term of “IT” or information technology in much of the literature that I read over the summer. And I started to wonder if we’re doing ourselves any favors by still insisting on using this term. I tried to answer that question for myself, and have come to the following realization:  The term information technology has its origin in a world where computers were largely absent – it was first mentioned in a 1958 Harvard Business Review  article . The article singled out three distinct elements: “technique of processing large amounts of information rapidly”, “statistical and mathematical methods to decision-making problems” and finally, “the simulation of higher-order thinking through computer programs”. The article further explained that information technology would have its greatest impact on middle- and top management. To be very clear, the article was not wrong and in fac...