Electric Thoughts in a Digital Era

Tag: AI

  • We Need To Talk About AI Commerce

    Over the last six months, I have been talking and learning as much as possible regarding artificial intelligence. I use a large language model daily to assist me in my consultancy business, but I have many thoughts about AI-based shopping/commerce. Shopping is an inherently social experience, and e-commerce has already made it more transactional. What will agents and AI models do to it?

    As I write this in July 2025, artificial intelligence is being driven by incumbents such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, as well as startups like OpenAI and Anthropic. These businesses have three key ingredients required to offer AI at scale: cloud platforms that provide processing power, large language models (LLMs), and applications that enable inference to create results from consumer prompts.

    Image created with a prompt “software eating retail”

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  • The Jassification of Amazon

    Andy Jassy is driving efficiency within Amazon, which should be facing the innovator’s dilemma; yet, Amazon’s culture, technology, and people (or the lack thereof) will ensure its future.

    When Amazon founder and current CEO Jeff Bezos announced that his successor would be Andy Jassy, I admit I thought he had made a mistake. However, Bezos was three years ahead and could see the future. I thought Dave Clarke or Jeff Wilke should have taken over, yet in hindsight, neither was a good fit, and Bezos was hedging the future with someone who built a software business from nothing to billions rather than taking the logistics infrastructure builder or consumer-focused leader that would have been prescient.

    The Day Two Version of Amazon

    Following the founder of a generational company is hard, I would say borderline impossible. I simply look at what happened at Alibaba, with Daniel Zhang, and how hard it was to follow Jack Ma. We will never know how much input Zhang really had, as Jack Ma was persona non grata with the Chinese government regarding Alipay’s impact on the financial sector in China. Alibaba has a different corporate strategy than Amazon, but the similarities between the situations strike a tone for me. Daniel Zhang stepped down and then abruptly left Alibaba Cloud, and was supposed to manage a fund.

    Source: The Verge

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  • Artificial Intelligence and its Financial Impact

    Artificial Intelligence and its Financial Impact

    Over the last six months, I have spoken with many startups that claim to have artificial intelligence (AI) as part of their solution. The reality is that many of these companies added AI to their pitch decks and materials without being able to showcase its impact. We are in a cycle in which lies and hopes are sold as the future. An incumbent, Amazon, has showcased the first example of an AI solution with financial impact.

    We are in the early days of AI’s impact. Google has tried and removed its AI summaries as the outcomes were undesirable due to the volume and accuracy of searches consumers do. What is clear to me is that consumer AI solutions are years away from being relevant and financial drivers. That said, I believe business AI solutions are closer due to the specificity of solutions.

    AI and finances as describe my meme imagery
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