[USER=2]@Alex Snyder[/USER], you’re right on with the letters A and I being tainted. But, I also think we're all to blame.
Given the size and scope of AI, it's more akin to a utility than a technology. It's everywhere we look, while also having many shapes, forms, and functions, while still also being comprised of countless smaller components. We don't think "nuclear power plant" or "plug" when someone says electricity. We shouldn't automatically think J.A.R.V.I.S., HAL 9000, or the Terminator when someone says AI, either. If someone is considering an AI-enhanced technology, they should first do a little bit of research into the different subcomponents that make up today's umbrella version of AI (e.g., Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision, etc.).
To de-nerd things a bit, let's look at ways we categorize things every day. Think of the abbreviation AI as you would when someone says they're an athlete. Most people would automatically respond back asking what sport that person played. When the person responds back with football, then the question is what position. When another person responds back they run track, the next question is what events do you participate in (or are you a runner or a sprinter, etc.). As humans, we love taxonomies (even if we don't know what they are!), and we should be applying that same conversational scrutiny to AI all the time because AI has many forms, functions, and all kinds of weirdness in between.
Just because the AI you know doesn't function in a certain way doesn't mean that there isn't a version that does. I know the legacy retail tech companies "me too" everything and then want to charge a fortune for it. There’s also a good chunk of the upstarts that have an MVP, at best, then blow all of their private equity money on booths, sponsorships, salespeople, and vaporware. I also know that when [USER=7]@joe.pistell[/USER] says that LLMs are bad at math and when [USER=236]@imacsweb[/USER] says that automation can't handle the complexities of tariffs, that's not the objective truth, but it's based on their experiences with a version of AI. There are AI applications that are devastatingly awesome at math and can easily handle tariff conversations, GLB frameworks, and all manners of legal complexities. It's up to us to learn about them.
I hope this thread keeps rolling because now the AI genie is out of the bottle, just like the Internet, it's not going to go back in. The more we talk about it on places like DealerRefresh, the better understanding we'll have about AI (as well as everything else dealership related), how to get the most out of it, and how not fall victim to some of those schilling it.
