A good way to illustrate the power of focus at the practical level is going back to Uber, which has enjoyed tremendous growth by solving a very real problem of providing to the masses a service to transport people easily, comfortably and relatively affordably.
How has Uber been able to grow so fast and scale so quickly? As we just discussed, they saw the new reality of mobile — with every person, both driver and rider, having a connected computer in their pocket — and leveraged that new normal as a platform to bring people together in a way never before imagined or realized. So, one might ask, what do they own exactly as a core asset?
The core application and ecosystem around the Uber experience is their primary asset and differentiator. But to deliver that experience, they apply rigorous focus. They run on infrastructure provided by Amazon , so they can be up and available all around the world. Their mapping technology is provided by Google Maps in the form of an API, so drivers take the fastest routes and you always know where you are.
Their messaging stack is provided by Twilio , ensuring you get that text message right when your driver has arrived. Uber leaves all of this to specialists who focus on these elements as their respective core businesses. One is that people's home interiors have been getting better. In the old days, when the average middle-class or upper middle-class home was relatively boring, drab, small and tasteless, going to a restaurant was an escape from the hum drum of spending another evening at home.
Also: TV and other home entertainment options have become amazing. These companies partnered with restaurants, enabling drivers to pick up food at restaurants and deliver it to customers, who used the app for payment, menu selection, ordering and to track the delivery to their door. With a critical mass of food delivery business, a breathtaking new concept came to the prepared food industry starting last year that mimicked the trend that rocked the world of enterprise IT: the cloud kitchen.
A cloud kitchen is a kitchen business that prepares food for alternatives to restaurants, such as delivery businesses, food trucks, catering businesses, meal kits and sometimes curbside or window pickup. In the enterprise space, "the cloud" is when data storage and applications are provisioned off-site, and the details of exactly where all this takes place is irrelevant.
Only uptime and performance matters, and it's up to the cloud provider to decide if your "stuff" is located on one server or distributed across a thousand servers. When you order a salad and a pizza from "brand" that's using cloud kitchens, it similarly doesn't matter that the food wasn't prepared in one of their restaurants, or that the salad was made in one place and the pizza in the other.
All that matters to the customer is quick delivery of a quality, branded product. Cloud kitchens have many names. The industry hasn't standardized on the label. They might also be called ghost kitchens, virtual kitchens, delivery kitchens, shadow kitchens, commissary kitchens, or dark kitchens.
But cloud kitchen is probably the best name. And they represent a radical improvement in efficiency and flexibility over the old restaurant model. So, companies no longer buy software; they buy the service that software delivers.
The old model of buying software and implementing it is giving way to the service model. Furthermore, the as-a-service model is extending even further and providing the use of the software, such as in cloud, rather than the actual code.
Just as software disrupted the infrastructure market by putting virtualization and automation layers over infrastructure, businesses are now turning that into a service. So, services are eating software. The voracious appetite of services does not stop with software. For example, Uber and its ride-sharing competitors are eating cars. The service Uber provides creates a connection between a person and a car and a person who needs a ride, rather than the old model of selling the person a car.
All across the spectrum, businesses and people are giving up their ownership of tangible assets and software products and exchanging them for the use of services. The buyer gains benefits of the use of the software and what the software runs on, rather than having to acquire data centers and software to get the usage. This has a lot of advantages. In the case of cloud and other elastic models, companies can move to much more efficient models because they can reap economies of scale from an asset perspective as well as from a software perspective.
It underlies much of what companies are doing with digital transformation. The inventor of this tool is Jacob Jackson , an undergraduate student and ex- OpenAI intern who quickly realized this idea and created a software tool for it. Here, a group of medical researchers created a tool that you can ask literally any questions on medical data and the AI generates a customized SQL query that is then used to retrieve the relevant data from the database.
For those more inclined to exploring the technical part of this feel free to read their research here and software code here. Want to build your website quickly? All you need to do is sketch it and this platform will use AI to create software code like html, css and js code ready in vue. Find out more about this platform here.
These are just a few examples of how AI is increasingly encroaching all parts of software development and eliminating mundane tasks of coding and programming rapidly! This is due to the motivation to automate the process of numerical analysis, data collection and eventually, processing and relevant code production. Researchers have higher-than-ever awareness and knowledge to infiltrate each and every problem at all levels with AI-powered software, from day-to-day anecdotes such as: Which kind of cookies shall we recommend to a customer given their shopping preferences?
And finally, to the processing of building smarter, easier-to-use software that may even write code for you. A person can no longer tell apart the fake celebrity faces generated by generative neural networks from the real ones, or need not remember the name of every function they will use when writing a script.
Imaginably, the wide application domains and near-human performance of AI-powered software will cause a paradigm shift in the way people deal with their daily personal and professional problems. Although some of us are pessimistic about, or in some extreme cases, consciously avoiding a world with overwhelming AI-powered software, there is not so much room for an escape.
Amazon, Google, and even your favorite neighborhood florist, are actively and sometimes secretly using AI to generate revenue. Face it, or be left behind. There is no customer requests for self driving BEVs. A classic trap most big enterprises with established business fall for is getting micro-focused on existing business segments while losing sight on the slowly eroding economic and business climate.
Tesla's story as an electric car is known to all but many may not know that it is the self-driving feature and the heavy use of AI in both software and hardware where the secret sauce lies. They have already driven 10 billion electric miles and the cars are collecting all the more data to disrupt not just the automotive markets but its adjacent markets in manufacturing, servicing, sales and in general mobility.
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