Saw through the Buzzwords

One of the biggest challenges facing visionaries and leaders looking to invest in technology is filtering through all of the noise -- both externally and internally.

External noise makes it difficult to understand even what a potential company or technology can really offer you -- it sounds like technobabble on an episode of Star Trek.

Internal noise comes from whatever your management is reading about on Twitter or in the news that day: How will you incorporate large language models (LLMs like ChatGPT) into our operations? What about AI? When are we going to get some AI?

MidJourney's artistic interpretation of the prompt "buzzword technobabble"

One of the most important steps in investigating and considering new technologies to amplify and optimize your process is to push through the internal noise to focus on the business opportunity (improve margins to increase profitability or EBITDA) and its associated key metrics (such as yield, throughput, etc), and through the external noise to match a technology or investment that can actually move those key metrics (such as automation, data team, AI, etc). This chapter will help you do that by covering some of the buzzy technologies you may be asked about -- and connecting those to the core KPIs they can move in the business.