Week 3 - Surfing the Tsunami

The third chapter in Surfing the Tsunami talks about industry perspectives on the potential impacts of artificial intelligence on how we approach business operations in the future.  This isn’t just related to marketing; better A.I. can translate to a huge variety of automations in all sorts of disciplines.  The book describes three general categories of said perspectives: optimism, pessimism, and realism.  Honestly, these three could apply to pretty much any personal viewpoint.


The optimists tend to focus on the potential benefit of A.I. influence, whether it be lightened workload within the industry, reduced operational costs and lower consumer prices.  Their viewpoint might miss some of the concerns of the pessimists, however.  They’d forecast issues such as a tighter job market as artificial intelligence replaces flesh-and-bone workers, or less flexibility to react to changes in the business environment since automations are often hard to adjust.  The reality (hence, realist) is most likely somewhere in the middle.



I tend to view the advent of A.I. as an evolution in business affairs, rather than a simple pro or con.  There’s certainly opportunity to improve efficiencies and reduce action timelines as machine learning takes serious steps forward, but those improvements need to be balanced with operational risk.  The “self-driving cars” I wrote about last week are a great example of an opportunity that carries substantial risk.  While that particular case could potentially cost lives in the event of an A.I. failure, in the greater business sense, there’s also financial and executable risk as well.  New technology should be implemented systematically, with controls in place to monitor potential issues.

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