MarTech: Stop buying AI and start buying capabilities

This article was originally published on MarTech by Greg Kihlström. View the original article here.

I sit through a lot of vendor pitches and conference keynotes. After enough of them, the slides blur. AI-powered routing. AI-powered insights. AI-powered content. By the third talk, you can’t tell whether you’re being sold the same product four times or four products once. The term is broad enough to cover anything, which is the problem. It tells you nothing about what you’re buying.

I don’t think we’ll be saying AI much within a couple of years, at least not the way we do now. Jay Pattisall and Mike Proulx at Forrester made the point recently: It’s the same arc as electric. Everything was an electric [whatever] until it wasn’t. We put food in the fridge, not the electric fridge.

There’s something useful in being specific about why you’re retiring the term because it’s not going to fade away elegantly on its own. Electricity left our vocabulary because we stopped paying attention to it. It just works. You plug something into an electric outlet, and you get the same current whether you want to or not. If it doesn’t work, you know something’s broken.

This article was originally published on MarTech by Greg Kihlström. View the original article here.