AI investment is missing a huge opportunity in the form of industry-specific AI apps designed to integrate with legacy business processes in medium-sized firms in trad industries. This investment should go into industry-specific incubators that bridge the capability and capital gaps that prevent startups from building these real-world AI solutions that drive immediate impact.
several possible ways to slice, but maybe a good proxy is whether it is big enough to have a chief procurement officer. that issue by sarah is excellent and highlights one dimension of the problem. on the data integration issue, there will be midsize firms where the issue is that a human is doing something that a machine should do — like receiving manifest information in various digital and hardcopy formats and transferring it into a master manifest table. that is likely to be the low-hanging fruit
I agree!
What size constitutes medium?
The amount of effort to build the amount of data engineering, data negotiations (as stated brilliantly by Sarah Constantin at https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/the-great-data-integration-schlep)
is almost the same as a large enterprise, so might as well go after the big one
I can see someone doing the same thing for the medium sized firms for no other reason than
1. client's leadership is desperate and see the benefits of this AI integration,
2. these medium sized clients are the biggest firms where the supplier knows the leadership personally.
3. the supplier's costs fit these medium sized firms' budgets
several possible ways to slice, but maybe a good proxy is whether it is big enough to have a chief procurement officer. that issue by sarah is excellent and highlights one dimension of the problem. on the data integration issue, there will be midsize firms where the issue is that a human is doing something that a machine should do — like receiving manifest information in various digital and hardcopy formats and transferring it into a master manifest table. that is likely to be the low-hanging fruit