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The analyst’s day is full of research. Now, this is the age of AI and AI is here to help, isn’t it? As everyone is talking about copilots and AI agents, why not using the tools at hand to do a little research on research. NB., no one really has a good definition of an AI agent, so this might become an additional topic for research. But I digress. Imagine the following project at hand, which is not only interesting for analysts, btw, but also for a variety of roles in the corporate world. Let’s call it vendor (competitor) monitoring. The job is the following: Research reputable sites for news about a number of vendors, relating to a set of keywords. Reputable sites are high quality news sites, high quality tech publications, high quality analyst sites and, of course the news pages of the vendors in question. Limit the time frame of the search matching to the cadence of my information requirement, e.g., “yesterday” for a daily update or “last week” for a weekly update. Provide a summary ...

A very happy, healthy and prosperous new year to all of you. This is also the time to review my blog and to have a look what your favourite posts of 2023 have been. With 23 posts, I admittedly have been somewhat lazy in 2023. Looking at the top ten read posts in 2023, there is a clear clustering about a few topics, none of them really surprising. There is a genuine interest in CX, ChatGPT, and vendors.  Again, this is not a surprise.  Still, there are a few surprises in the list! So, without further adoo, let’s hear the drumroll for your top five favourite posts on my blog – in ascending order. After all, some suspense cannot harm. The fifth place gets claimed by my review of ZohoDay 2022 – “ Don’t mess with Zoho – A Zohoday 2022 recap ”. Yes, you read that right. This is a 2022 post. The fourth place got claimed by another article on Zoho, almost one year younger: Zoho, how a technology company reimagines business software . It is a reflection on the Zoholics 2023 conference ...

Generative AI is here to stay. It is not only a hype that probably gets worse before it gets better. And we clearly still are in a hype, as the following chart showing the search interest for ChatGPT between October 1, 2022 and April 12, 2023 from Google Trends shows. Similarly, the Gartner Group sees Generative AI technology approaching the peak of inflated expectations in its 2022 hype cycle for artificial intelligence. To be sure, we see only the tip of the iceberg when looking at voice, text or image based services that we all know and use. The Gartner Group also foresees many industrial use cases reaching from drug and chip design to the design of parts to overall solutions.  You think that these scenarios lie far in the future? Read this Nature article from 2021 and think again. And in contrast to some of the other hypes that we have seen in the past few years, there are actual use cases that support the technology’s survival of the trough of disillusionment. As there are v...

The hype around generative AI, in particular ChatGPT, is still at a fever pitch. It created thousands of start-ups and at the moment attracts lots of venture capital . Basically, everyone – and their dog – jumps on the bandwagon, with the Gartner Group predicting that it is getting worse, before it is going to be better. According to them, generative AI is yet to cross the peak of inflated expectations. There are a few notable exceptions, though. So far, I haven’t heard major announcements by players like SAP , Oracle , SugarCRM , Zoho , or Freshworks . [update Mar 22, as of today Freshworks, too, has announced a beta program for generative AI services in its Freshchat product, supporting service, marketing and sales scenarios] Before being accused of vendor bashing … I take this is a good sign. Why? Because it shows that vendors like these have understood that it is worthwhile thinking about valuable scenarios before jumping the gun and coming out with announcements just to sta...