It’s déjà vu all over again: soon, all companies will be machine learning companies
An article of mine, “Todas las compañías serán compañías de machine learning” (“All companies will be machine learning companies”) in Spanish business monthly APD (pdf) recalls the early 1990s, when my colleague Julián de Cabo and I would go to great lengths in our classes at IE Business School to try to convince our management students that their companies would soon be internet companies, or they wouldn’t exist.
We were generally met with skepticism: after spending half the class explaining how to access the internet, which was seen as a side issue, interesting, but of no importance in the medium term. A few years later, reality set in: if the internet doesn’t work in your company, you might as well shut up shop, because you’re not going to be doing much of anything.
The advent of generative algorithms with their billion-parameter models has now put companies in a similar situation: it is not a question of using ChatGPT to a greater or lesser extent, but of realizing that machine learning can speed up and improve a business, and that those who fail to rethink their value chain and apply it to those points where it can do good will be at a strong disadvantage compared to those who do.
