AI Agents are excellent for one thing and that is Profits baby!
Plus 5 DEMONSTRATIONS of technology’s bizarre effects on our behaviours, a TRUpreneur on how to be an unsuccessful entrepreneur, & FTW - Not on my Bingo Card
MAIN COURSE: Marc Benioff’s AI shilling pays off BIG time for Salesforce
In past Tonics (here and also here) I have been skeptical about the great salesmen that helms one of the stock market’s high tech darlings, Salesforce. Partly that is because I have experience using their CRM product which is solid but not spectacular. But mostly it is because, at this point, we don’t need another snake oil voice over-hyping any type of AI.
But I will admit when I am wrong. At last weeks earnings call, Benioff updated everyone about their remarkable success with Agentforce. I know many of you don’t click the links to read the source article so let me summarize it for you: Blah blah blah blah, we convinced a bunch of corporate punters to purchase this software and consequently profits are way way up, blah blah blah blah. Of course the stock market rewarded this announcement with a modest 10% bump in price.
I will point out though that not one of the blahs was a detailed case study or informative customer reference verifying the grand capabilities of Agentforce. But you will be glad to know that Marc predicted an even rosier future for us all, "On top of this agentic layer, we'll soon see a robotic layer as well where these agents will manifest into robots," he said, adding, "These agents are not tools. They are becoming collaborators." He also predicted that Salesforce are ”…unleashing a new era of digital labor for every business and every industry”.
Also at this earning call Salesforce announced that they have a new CFO who is a Accounting AI Agent trained on the entire CPA documentation named Hal and that C-3PO will join them in the new year as Chief Talent Officer. Salesforce didn’t respond to enquiries from journalists that Marc’s remarks were actually given by an AI personality twin (as I wrote about last week in Is it Live… or is is MirrorEx).
Secondi: FIVE DEMONSTRATIONS of technology’s bizarre effects on our behaviours
This article describes how AI voice clones are featuring in new scams and how we all need a secret phrase for family and friends. It was obviously written by a retiree from the CIA as the examples included “The sparrow flies at midnight”. Sounds like something from Cold War era Berlin. Not just your favorite drink or food or nickname? Of course if your have created a personality AI agent it probably can guess all your possible secret phrases.
Zipcar, which is nearly wholly dependent on its mobile app to function, experienced a profound technology malfunction, meaning customers were locked out of cars, couldn’t lock them, or return them properly. In a big surprise, customer support was overwhelmed and unhelpful, some telling clients they could be liable for stolen cars if they couldn’t lock them. Who says old time customer service is dead? Just saw an ad from Hyundai advertising their no keys forever with their mobile app to control their car. A hard no thanks. I’m still freaked out that we can’t manually roll windows down anymore.
I cannot stop laughing at this article which completely supports my thesis this week. Instead of stopping passengers who were having sex on the plane, the flight deck videoed these intimate moments off of camera they use for opening the cockpit door, and then posted the video onto social media. Of course you would do that as we must record everything in our life for Insta, over actually doing our jobs.
This article puzzles me. Here is a company who has built some of the most advanced holographic and animation technology, evidently able to show great realistic detail. You would think to demonstrate it they would create spectacular views of the Grand Canyon or something equally awe inspriring. No you guessed wrong. They choose instead to depict aliens. What?
For those that think what is in our current culture doesn’t affect children or has all the wrong values, here is a cautionary tale (Of course there will be some psychology studies somewhere that cannot be replicated “proving” me wrong). A young teenager creates his own cryptocurrency, buys a few of his invented coins, promotes them on a trading platform and then sells out for a cool $50,000. He gets caught and worries. He shouldn’t have as his Dad is proud of him for mastering a sophisticated digital platform, whose name is pump.fun. As in pump and dump the name of what the kid did. You can’t make this stuff up. No wonder comedy is a dying occupation.
As casual readers of this weekly publication can tell, I track what is happening in the whole AI field fairly closely. I use some AI in my work but quickly encounter it’s deficiencies and drawbacks. Which is why I am always surprised by the number of former associates who are now “hard pushing” AI as consultants and coaches. As a grounding viewpoint, this week’s article by Gary Marcus goes through some simple experiments with visual AI tools, particularly Dall-E, to demonstrate serious limitations.
I have experienced the similar effects. It took me a full 30 minutes to create a photographic avatar for my fictional protagonist - Harry Lancaster - that wasn’t completely great looking. No end of requested changes would render even small traces of ugliness. Obviously the AI product - which wasn’t DALL-E - was trained only on Hollywood actors of a certain age.
In my last blog I introduced the concept that many people should not attempt to become entrepreneurs, and that there are some standard behavioural types that will mostly prove to be unsuccessful. My friend Pam helped me come to this important insight. There are always exceptions but in general these types have fatal flaws. You don’t normally hear about them, as most writing and podcasts about entrepreneurship overly choose and celebrate success. There aren’t newsletters entitled The Serial Unpreneur or podcasts called Small Business Failure & Incompetence.
But there should be in order to bring balance and perspective to the process of starting your own business. So let’s examine more of the types of people I have seen in my 25 plus years of being an entrepreneur
Click here to continue reading The Pam Paradox part 2- Five more types who are unsuited being Entrepreneurs
FTW - Not on My Bingo Card
Look if the prestigious Oxford University Press can choose 'brain rot' as the Word of The Year for 2024 winning with 37,000 votes, then your virtually unknown and humble reporter can independently choose ‘not on my bingo card’ as my word for the week to forget.
Some of you will be saying how often is that overused. Plenty I say, with a quick bit of AI based searching coming up with it being used in nearly everything as you can see below:
Comic book revelations
Matt Gaetz’s abortive AG nomination
Another possible cabinet pick
Reddit morning observations
Many LinkedIn job announcements (the perpetrators shall remain anonymous).
I realize that many younger people might not have played bingo yet what with using the new image feathering tool in TikTok, balancing follows between X and BlueSky, and learning how to monetize every image on Pinterest. Well let me give you a short primer. Each card has 24 numbers on it, listed in a column format under the letters B-I-N-G-O. Sorry to profoundly disappoint, but there is nothing insightful, useful, predictive or even much interesting on a bingo card. So not sure why we use this hack-neyed phrase (lasts week’s FTW)
In addition Bingo is a mindless and boring activity where a caller stands at the front of a room filled with people and their cards, repeatedly shouting out each ball selected randomly that is one letter - number combination. Such as “Under the B, 6”. If you have this combo on your card you cover it up in a variety of ways. This process continues until someone shouts Bingo when their card is covered. I fell asleep just writing this last paragraph.
Playing bingo is quite similar though to endlessly scrolling through TikTok vids (too short in duration to earn the “eo”) of different people emoting in extremis, shouting out their homemade script in front of a jiggling camera with dubious lighting in a vain attempt to seem… “NEXT WEEK’S FTW”. Put guesses in the comments!
HEADLINE HEADSCRATCHERS
It seems inconceivable to me that you would wait all year to save a few bucks to get off better. Carpe Diem!
Of course! Owning a shilled set of fake incorporeal currencies is so empowering.
As always, thanks for reading. Please comment or forward if you feel so moved