At this year’s annual end-of-year collab meeting in Hamburg, we took a closer look at what we have learned in 2024 by bringing together our local groups with an open invite to other community members, a few selected speakers and created a curated packed afternoon with a dozen lightning talks.
Attending this year was a bigger crowd than past years — a diverse set of digital leaders from large, complex and global organisations like Canyon, Jungheinrich, Lufthansa, OTTO alongside agencies such as Diconium and Thoughtworks as well as software firms like CoreMedia, Magnolia, Staffbase and a few other friends from near and far.
Employee communication platform software firm Haiilo hosted us in their charming offices, which was a fitting scene for learning and networking.
Read moreAs someone who has witnessed the evolution of programming languages over five decades, I've noticed an interesting parallel:
Writing prompts for AI is remarkably similar to traditional programming. The only real difference is the syntax we use to express our intentions.
Let me take you on a journey through time.
Read moreWhen we make decisions our thinking is informed by societal norms, “guardrails”, that guide our decisions like the laws and rules that govern us. But what are good guardrails in today’s world of overwhelming information flows and increasingly powerful technologies, such as artificial intelligence?
Based on the latest insights from the cognitive sciences, economics, and public policy, the new book "Guardrails" offers a novel approach to shaping decisions by embracing human agency in its social context. In brief: The book explores the importance of establishing guardrails to manage the power dynamics in the digital age.
Written by Urs Gasser (Professor of Public Policy, Governance and Innovative Technology at TU Munich) and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford), the book shows how the quick embrace of technological solutions can lead to results we don’t always want.
The two authors explain how society itself can provide guardrails more suited to the digital age, ones that empower individual choice while accounting for the social good, encourage flexibility in the face of changing circumstances, and ultimately help us to make better decisions as we tackle the most daunting problems of our times, such as global injustice and climate change.
In a recent member’s call we were joined by Viktor who took us through the thinking behind the book, how human decisions are flawed and also how just looking at AI through the lens of misinformation, bias or privacy is short-sighted. The problem is bigger. The book is about principles for good decisions, and Viktor shared quite a few memorable examples.
Read moreI recently attended the annual CMS Experts meeting in New York, where artificial intelligence (AI) emerged as a recurring theme despite not being the event's primary focus. Influential speakers such as Sree Sreenivasan and Alan Pelz-Sharpe offered insightful viewpoints that inspired me to share my thoughts on this technology.
Sree’s talk was provocatively and timely titled: “We have no idea what we are doing with AI, but we are clearly going to do it.”. He argued that using the term "hallucinations" to describe issues with AI technology lets developers off the hook for addressing these problems. Sreenivasan also points out that in the AI industry, users are both the product and the lab, creating a more dangerous situation than social media.
Alan’s talk was “Is your Organization ready for AI?” and the brief answer is no. He explained that organisations must identify the processes that they think AI will improve, the tasks that will power those processes, have the inputs have been quality controlled, does the organisation which people and skills are required to build and operate the solution, and have decision-makers agreed on the metrics for success.
AI has become a buzzword, promising dramatic advances in various areas, including healthcare and transportation. However, it is crucial to maintain a balanced perspective and be aware of AI's advantages and disadvantages.
Read moreAcross all industries, organizations are exploring how to leverage the power of Generative AI. Everyone is talking about AI today, but how can you take advantage of this in the content management world? How can you leverage all the content you’ve created and combine that with AI to provide a great experience for your customers?
In a recent members’ call we heard from Nicole Rogers from "Generative AI Copilots" - startup ai12z. Nicole shared how Generative AI can be combined with your content and your CMS to enhance your site visitors’ web experiences. Examples of how you can incorporate this technology right on your website includes:
A chatbot in the corner of your website to answer your site visitors’ questions about your products and services.
Digital assistants (aka “copilots”) to help them along their journey, providing personalized recommendations and assisting in completing tasks like making a purchase.
AI-powered search to respond to your users’ search queries with detailed summaries.
Read moreIt's now been two months since CMS Kickoff 24 in January in Florida and for a recent member's call we heard reflections on the impact of AI from seasoned CMS consultant Tom Cranstoun who joined us from the UK.
While CMS Kickoff 24 wasn't all about AI, the speakers made Tom rethink AI's role in content management. Given the translation, bias, regulation challenges and lack of trust in AI, one needs to employ reviewers and editors to correct the content; AI is better suited for consuming content.
Let’s think that the current state of AI creating content is a beta experiment, best left to the tech guys; we have a business to think of.
In this call, Tom shared how AI Simplicity affects your business, the need for better content modelling and also the key responsibility of an emerging team role: The AI evangelist.
Read moreThe hype around that thing called AI can be deafening and it’s quite overwhelming to try to stay on top of all the seemingly relevant AI developments.
To help us untangle what’s really happening and the impact it is having, we recently invited digital platform product lead Seb Barre from TELUS in Toronto to walk us through how he sees the big picture and notable changes.
Seb made the interesting point that we are entering a new do-it-yourself era for generative AI. While the first wave (last year) was dominated by large, proprietary offerings, including OpenAI, today other options have arrived on the scene, which allows organisations to seize new use cases and also approach it with more flexibility and lower cost attached.
As expected, it became a 30-minute packed member’s call on large language models, action models, new devices, privacy, how search is failing us, open source and much more. Seb shared plenty of interesting tools and also shared how to get your organisation to embrace AI.
Read more2023 was quite a year with many big milestones. Also a confusing year with massive changes. Massive tech layoffs were a huge topic at the beginning of the year and in a memorable ask me anything with design leader Peter Merholz, he explained why he referred to it as a social contagion.
Also, at the beginning of the year, AI was more of a research thing and then just a few months into 2023, tools like Chat GPT was a big theme at pretty much every group meeting. We heard how it acts as a kind of assistant, how it was used officially and often also unofficially and terms like hallucination changed meaning. At the end of the year, Dutch Internet pioneer Steven Pemberton provided us a helpful reminder that there's no I in AI (yet).
In this long overdue community update, I’ll share a bit more behind the scenes and provide an update on our plans for 2024.
Read moreIt’s that time of year, where we look back at another year of learning and networking. We really like to have a good conversation and meet in person, but sharing openly as much as possible is also an important part of what we do.
The big stories this year covered AI (surprise!), intranets (an oldie, but goodie) and also a book launch on delivering services.
Keeping with tradition, here are the five posts, which seemed to resonate the most based on readership and engagement numbers.
Read moreWhat happens when you bring together leaders from different industries who are working on different fields?
Yesterday our digital transformation friends at diconium in Hamburg hosted our sold out annual Christmas member's meeting, where we had an afternoon of learning and networking across the different fields we cover incl design leadership, employee experience, digital strategy and product management.
As the legendary advisor and influential consultant Ram Charan famously said:
"Listening isn't just hearing; it requires the willingness to entertain other viewpoints - especially opposing ones"
Like a miniature version of our 3-day Aarhus conference, we made it through 10 lightning talks in a packed afternoon with quite some thought provoking perspectives. In between we had a bit time for reflections and the conversation continued over some good food.
Read more“Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.“
Quoting novelist Martin Amis who died earlier this year, Sree Sreenivasan in a recent member's call, explored the usefulness of generative AI and we looked both at why it’s scary and how it applies to our work.
Little doubt remains that generative AI will have substantial significance in our ever-changing world, but it’s also clear that vast impact remains to be seen.
It’s a fast moving field with many big announcements happening weekly, so tuning into a curious and experienced mind like Sree proved quite interesting.
Sree is the former Chief Digital Officer of New York City….
Read moreWith AI Copilots already in the marketplace and many workplaces, we are now beginning an accelerated transformation of work.
How is work changing today? What's different this time? How are organisations measuring, managing and leading this change?
In a recent member’s call industry leader, Microsoft MVP and past Boye conference speaker, Richard Harbridge joined us from Toronto and shared key insights to help you better understand, prepare and lead improved AI enriched communication, collaboration and management experiences.
So work is changing, it’s going to happen and it’s coming fast
Read moreAI can generate the best content, proofread text, write code, and even conduct code reviews. AI is the best and will put us all out of our jobs.
Is this hype grounded in reality? Is AI truly helping people or are we just diverting our attention to becoming experts in prompt engineering which then consumes our hard-earned time?
I chaired the Tech Forum at the recently held Web Summer Camp in Croatia, which was also the Q3 meeting for our European CMS Expert members. Ondrej Polesny from Kontent.ai kicked us off with a deep dive into the real-life narratives, practical insights, and the potential of AI in content management.
Read moreAI is coming hard and fast at all of us, but assessing AI capabilities has so many dimensions.
Why should communications teams be championing AI in their organizations? Precisely because of that middle L in LLM. The deep knowledge of genres, rhetoric, metaphor, and other functions of language that determine the success of communication is key to assessing the potential and limits of AI.
It is our professional responsibility to discover, share, and discuss ethical problems and universal or local benefits within our field of knowledge. but we also have a responsibility to go beyond our professional perspective in this learning process. What can seem a blessing in communications may be a curse in public management and vice versa. In this phase, we really need cross-disciplinary insights.
Read moreIn a 2018 article I authored, “How AI Assistants will impact businesses and consumers,” I championed the potential of AI assistants to reshape the landscape of business and consumer interactions. At the time, it was evident that AI-driven platforms were poised to revolutionize how people accessed information, made decisions, and connected with brands. A central tenet of this transformation was the recognition that cultivating and retaining customer trust was pivotal to the widespread acceptance and success of AI assistants.
A central theme of the article was the capacity of AI assistants to analyze diverse data sources, spanning news, regulations, and customer satisfaction metrics. Armed with this wealth of information, these platforms had the potential to offer astute recommendations tailored to individual preferences and needs. However, it was clear that these recommendations hinged on user trust.
Trust was identified as the bedrock for effective AI platform performance. A virtuous cycle was posited, where a user's trust in an AI assistant would lead to greater task delegation and decision-making authority. This, in turn, would furnish the assistant with more data to refine its recommendations, thereby reinforcing user trust. Conversely, any negative experiences could disrupt this trust cycle, underscoring the delicate equilibrium AI platforms needed to maintain.
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