Todd Nist

If you're connected with me, you know I scream about how necessary integrations are. Check out this piece where I explain more for insideBIGDATA!

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Fun fact: The enterprise/corporate industry is driving the AI revolution - not consumers. This is the complete opposite of previous technology revolutions we've seen, like the PC or internet. The Dallas Regional Chamber's Convergence AI event gave a fantastic overview on the effect of AI currently and where innovators aim to see the science go. Businesses around the world are investing billions in AI applications and developing an AI cloud infrastructure that can handle future processes. Your business can join this revolution. Take a look at your existing processes. There are many small ways AI can augment your operations that don't involve investing heavily, or implementing new steps for your team. It's an exciting time to be a technology innovator! #AI

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"..Although it’s always helpful to improve documentation for developers, many (myself included) prefer to dive in and learn while doing." -- an excerpt from the quoted post below. That quote from Jon Udell highlights a core challenge with documentation: determining the target audience. Unfortunately, trying to cater to everyone often leads to disenfranchising some, which can turn documentation from a tool for spreading goodwill into one that spreads ill-will. Large Language Model-driven chatbots offer a more adaptable solution to this age-old problem by providing a companion that aids working through the problem, courtesy of its natural language interaction modality. Jon and I have known each other for what feels like eons in computer time. Even when we haven't spoken directly, I feel we're often on the same wavelength about the evolution of software. For instance, I was addressing a similar issue with production documentation earlier today and turned to our #OPAL agent to expedite finding a solution, as illustrated by the following session transcripts. [1] https://lnkd.in/eWrrbXMG -- where the &t url parameter puts the page view in animated teletype mode (approx 120 per msec per typed word interval). [2] https://lnkd.in/eVZKE2vf -- conventional page view. #GenAI #AI #SmartAgent #UseCase

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Another day, another new, faster #LLM. Meet Claude 3.5 Sonnet from #Anthropic. "Claude 3.5 Sonnet operates at twice the speed of Claude 3 Opus. This performance boost, combined with cost-effective pricing, makes Claude 3.5 Sonnet ideal for complex tasks such as context-sensitive customer support and orchestrating multi-step workflows." https://lnkd.in/ecXUMhKE #AI #genAI #CX #AIorchestration

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Focusing on the fundamentals of "garbage in, garbage out," this new update will open up the potential for public data to reduce illicit seafood in supply chains. Special thanks to our advisor, Roberta Carraro, for introducing some best practices of the Herokai. Shipping weekly makes it OK to be smoll, galvanizes teams and helps customers grow with you!

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"One of the things we don’t want to happen when we take a biometric test is we don’t want there to be any intermediary because the data can be stolen, so we rely on only browsers with end-to-end encryption. In Africa, because people are data-conscious, they use a lot of browsers that have proxies. The browser sends a user's site to another server which compresses and sends it back to the user as a light page.  The problem with that is that you can’t do end-to-end encryption. There are a lot of browsers like this which are good for saving data but not for running verification processes." Insightful conversation with Sylvia Brune of pawaPass https://lnkd.in/eCXMpqDD

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Check out my colleague Zack's blog, where he shares stories ranging from time in lead gen to being an AE/SE/SA in the field, along with insights on new tech, career ideas, and more. Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/edB2ccbB

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Interesting discussion and viewpoints in a tiny thread and a fine example of "We will do it with the APIs"... Browser "natively" ignores/shuns/blocks a subset of published, available APIs. A LOUD group says that is not it's role and this is another symptomatic fail of disappointing browser, 2nd Loud group says those API results are intrusive and annoying based on context. How clever of browser! 3rd group (most of us) admits I had NO IDEA that could even happen! The move deeper and broader you and your business go into API world, the bigger the blackbox full of magic and chaos. APIs are everywhere and do everything....but should they? Who/what decides in your organization? https://lnkd.in/dBZ8wWze

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I just posted about Ploze to Product Hunt: https://lnkd.in/ebtktneU - I'd appreciate it if you'd take a look. (Unlock and integrate your digital life using Ploze: Load your data on-device from exports from a myriad of services, and view it all in an integrated searchable timeline. There is no cloud component to Ploze - it works on your computer.)

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CJ Gustafson (check out his newsletter Mostly Metrics) points out what we've seen firsthand... Net Dollar Retention is on a steady decline. Why? As many in the comments point out, seat seat-based pricing is great when companies are growing... but a lot harder when headcount is being cut. Usage-based pricing has the same expansion upside and contraction downside. And where many tech companies sell to other tech companies, hard times are felt all around. We need an updated renewal and expansion playbook. The days of automatic seat or usage growth are over, and short-term tactics like price increases and blanket upsell (think SDR motion to clients or upsell based on time as a client) aren't working.

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The work our team does at NMI never ceases to amaze me. 290% growth in the first year is an astonishing figure! We recently spoke with an ISO who was able to access better reporting, onboard merchants 5x faster and grow net revenue through the NMI platform by 290% in their first year partnering with us. A company spokesperson said, "NMI is such a valued relationship because we couldn’t have done this without them. It’s the relationships even more than the tech, integrations and APIs; anytime I’ve ever needed anything — company support or client support — I get a response. In this business where speed matters, NMI has done a solid job for us." Read their full story here: https://bit.ly/3VRoWM5 #ISO #Fintech #Payments

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What can guitarist Nuno Bettencourt teach us about enterprise processes?    I’ve been playing guitar since I was 13 years old, and the harsh reality is this: It’s not the gear, it's you. Nuno Bettencourt said it best in a recent interview with Rick Beato (check out Rick's YouTube channel for more info). One day, Nuno got to try Eddie Van Halen's guitar and amp on stage. Van Halen was his hero, and he thought he would finally get the chance to sound just like him... only to find out that he sounded just like the same old him! Of course, you need to have a decent rig, but the most expensive items you can buy won't bring anything new to your playing. It’s all in the hands and in the head. So, why am I even talking about this? Because when talking to our clients, we hear the same kind of behavior all the time. “Oh, we can't do this or that right now. We need a new tool for that.” Now, it is possible that the process to get a specific piece of information is so time-consuming and complicated that a tool is indeed the only way to get it. But most of the time, that's not the case. The problem lies in the fact that there's not a clear picture of what needs to be done to achieve a certain outcome. What’s unfortunate is, if you try to solve the problem with a new tool, you will often lose weeks, if not months, finding THE perfect tool (which might even be quite expensive). In the meantime, you will have lost time and money for little to no improvement in your day-to-day operations. That's why, at Quanta, we often say to our clients that what you can do with a tool, you should, in theory, be able to do with a pen and a piece of paper. If you can't do that, then maybe you haven't thought enough about what you are trying to achieve. Maybe the solution you are looking for can be achieved simply and for a fraction of the cost. That’s also why we believe that starting early with a simple solution will always beat a grand and spectacular digital transformation. So, that’s my piece of advice from the music world. Don’t spend too much time looking for that shiny piece of gear. Instead, concentrate on getting better with what you’ve got today. You won’t believe the rewards. 

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Modern Data Stack Mess... 🍿 I'm afraid the first 13 minutes are funny because it is true. Even though Dagster CEO Pete Hunt (great session Pete 🙌 ) try to exaggerate a bit with a fictional series B company's modern data stack as an example I am afraid that the picture isn't far from reality for many companies at different sizes and many data engineers will recognise parts if not the whole story. The solution presented is declarative asset-oriented orchestration, which I find expected and reasonable from the CEO of Dagster, and I agree that looking from the POV of the abstraction layer - declarative management (aka data contracts) - is a great way to address the problems raised in the video (and many more). However, in my playbook I approach declarative management with a broader scope than the orchestration service. BTW, data council 24 has released a number of sessions on Youtube, many are really good (even if they are biased by the presenter's employment). Video link: https://lnkd.in/dCBZW5W4 #dataengineering #dataplatform #moderndatastack

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I love Matt's analogy of us being in the first inning of AI, but I really appreciate his emphasis on trust. Without trust in the data that is used to train the AI models as well as how organizations use the data we entrust them with, progress and results will be stalled. Take a minute to listen to this interview. #AI #Data

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this demo never gets old for me... check out claude 3.5 sonnet and its new multi-modal capability especially with interpreting charts, graphs, or transcribing text from imperfect images.

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Since I'm on a 5 hour flight journey ✈, I thought I might as well pen down my thoughts on the 2 day Enterprise GenAI conference I attended this week in the Bay area, with great insights and amazing interactions with major Fortune 50 companies. 1) If you don't have a Data strategy in place, then your GenAI strategy is going to be harder/longer/costlier to execute. Probably one way to start is using GenAI to convert your unstructured data to structured data, and once you're getting meaningful insights and inferences using AI/ML, then you hop on to the Gen AI use cases. Stats shared during the conference indicated that 68% of enterprise data is not analysed, with 80% of proportion time on data cleaning, and the biggest challenge is that nearly 82% of enterprises are inhibited by data silos! In short, there is no GenAI strategy without a Data strategy! 2) Gen AI is here to stay. It's just that we need to taper down on expectations that it radically transform our work lives coz that's probably not going to happen either in 2024 or 2025. So yes, humans are still going to be around doing software development jobs, creating slides and spreadsheets, it's just that the way we work WILL change dramatically as we start these using AI tools (i.e. AI will augment human work). So over the next two years, we could see more of time being saved, efficiency improved BUT the quality of the output and the RoI using these AI tools have a few more years to go! 3) That is why human intervention will be required over the next 18 to 24 months to validate outputs from projects using Gen AI coz we have seen enough hallucination cases going on, with chatbots in particular. 4) As we saw in the Cloud era, you don't really need to use Gen AI for everything. For some use cases it could probably make sense using a combination of AI techniques with RPA instead of solely using GenAI. 5) Many large enterprises are still not able to appreciate the "initial RoI" from their wide scale "internal" rollouts. They have realized with GenAI you need to use various other techniques like RAG, fine tuning the data, training and cleaning the data, and also use several use LLMs as some LLMs are great for summarization while others are good for translations or transcriptions. All this adds to the OPEX, which was not predetermined during the planning phases. 6) We're definitely in the "Game of Prompts" era and it's just that these large neural networks need more time and data to better understand us humans, and us humans need to figure out the right prompt to get effective responses too. 7) The Gen AI market is also witnessing a new trend to move away from costlier GPUs & LLMs to CPUs & SLMs (Small Language models). The holy grail is to get these SLMs in our smartphones, as you have lot of data integration across different apps & services on smartphones. When this happens, "personalization" will become a reality! Gtg, LinkedIn just said I ran out of tokens, ermm I mean characters 😂

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Question for my LinkedIn community who're managing software development cycles - I'd love your thoughts. It's my belief that Topcoder presents a unique development resource/platform that allows engineering teams to evolve traditional Agile methodology, by incorporating elements of quantum mechanics into the SDLC process. What are your thoughts? Can Topcoder be the catalyst that changes the future of work and process of software development? Thanks in advance. Looking for thoughtful feedback. Eric #agile #softwareengineering

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Could collecting less customer data actually be better than collecting more customer data? As founders, we all know the need to protect Personally Identifiable Information (PII). But what actually counts as PII? It's not as simple as you might think. I talked to Joe Toscano, founder of DataGrade, and he broke down some common misconceptions. → It's not just obvious stuff like email addresses or full names → PII can be created by combining multiple pieces of data → There's a lack of clarity in both laws and industry standards around PII This matters because if you're collecting PII, your risk level immediately goes up. Joe's #1 piece of advice for mitigating that risk: Data minimization. In other words, only collect the data you absolutely need, for as long as you need it, for specific purposes. Resist the temptation to hoard data just because you might want it someday. → The more data you have, the bigger your risk surface → "Nice to have" data isn't worth the compliance headaches → You can always collect more later if you really need it By shifting to a mindset of data minimization, you can avoid a lot of the thorniest privacy pitfalls. Because at the end of the day, the safest data is the data you don't have at all. It's not the flashiest approach, but when it comes to PII, less is definitely more. — How do you approach data minimization in your own products? What challenges have you faced? For more on staying compliant as you scale, check out Joe Toscano’s interview on minimumviablepodcast.com

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