by twieberneit | Feb 19, 2024 | Blog, Sponsored |
During ZohoDay24, Zoho amongst other topics, gave some insight into how the company looks at AI. Raju Vegesna presented Zoho’s AI vision and progress. Additionally, I had the opportunity for a one on one with Zoho’s director of AI research, Ramprakash (Ram) Ramamoorthy. If you want to listen and watch the interview, you can do this here. Both represented a vision that is refreshingly differentiated from the current hype with everyone and their dog talking like large language models, LLMs, are the everything one needs. Well, let me tell you: They aren’t. But let me come to this point later. In addition to not every language model being created equal, and typical for a hype, there is still too much talk about the technology itself, whereas in the words of Raju and Ram the best AI implementation is “when the customer doesn’t know they are using AI but finds value in the output”. This resonates very well with me, as one of my beliefs is that the customer shouldn’t care about the technology that is used to achieve the desired outcome, within some constraints like legality, ethics, and efficiency, of course. Zoho is a technology vendor with a focus on business applications. So, Zoho quite quickly realized that consumer type AI that e.g., helps with spell checks, or nowadays research, suffers from two fundamental flaws: lacking privacy/security and accuracy when it comes to business applications. Both violate some of Zoho’s core tenets, namely their pursue of privacy and business applications that offer a lot of value to the customer. Take the example of improving one’s writing – for some...
