It’s utterly ridiculous. They’re desperate to add AI everywhere since they’ve made huge investments without generating meaningful profit, so they have to at least pump up usage numbers so they can argue “it’s a long-term investment” towards their shareholders.
That does make the most sense. A pretty common thing in those companies, ‘bet the company’ on some big brand/concept, then when it fails do rebranding of/bundling with more successful products and declare victory to your investors, collect your bonus and enjoy the money you get to keep when/if the chickens come home to roost. Ideally on the next executives tenure so you still get to blame them for messing up ‘your vision’.
One of my favorite examples, IBM had Sam Palmisano declare a ‘Roadmap 2015’ and then immediately retired, claiming the hypothetical victory of his entirely made up projections, and blaming Ginni Romnetty for failing to deliver. See also their attempt to brand a whole lot of unrelated stuff ‘Watson’ in the wake of the jeopardy stunt, and their reclassifying basically all their hardware sales as ‘cloud’ to investors when nothing credible popped for them, and they just said ‘anything that might be virtualization is cloud’, even if it were the same exact virtualization they had been doing for decades…
It’s utterly ridiculous. They’re desperate to add AI everywhere since they’ve made huge investments without generating meaningful profit, so they have to at least pump up usage numbers so they can argue “it’s a long-term investment” towards their shareholders.
That does make the most sense. A pretty common thing in those companies, ‘bet the company’ on some big brand/concept, then when it fails do rebranding of/bundling with more successful products and declare victory to your investors, collect your bonus and enjoy the money you get to keep when/if the chickens come home to roost. Ideally on the next executives tenure so you still get to blame them for messing up ‘your vision’.
One of my favorite examples, IBM had Sam Palmisano declare a ‘Roadmap 2015’ and then immediately retired, claiming the hypothetical victory of his entirely made up projections, and blaming Ginni Romnetty for failing to deliver. See also their attempt to brand a whole lot of unrelated stuff ‘Watson’ in the wake of the jeopardy stunt, and their reclassifying basically all their hardware sales as ‘cloud’ to investors when nothing credible popped for them, and they just said ‘anything that might be virtualization is cloud’, even if it were the same exact virtualization they had been doing for decades…