AI isn’t artificial, nor intelligent, but it is everywhere!

AI isn’t artificial, nor intelligent, but it is everywhere!

By Keith Moore
Distinguished Technologist at HPE

You can’t turn around without hearing something “AI”. AI is everywhere in marketing materials, branding, hucksters, and yes, even some actual, real amazing technical and societal breakthroughs. One can immediately compare this to the Web 2.0/3.0, the blockchain craze, and before that the dot.com era enthusiasm. To be sure, the over-selling of the LLM as a panacea is finally starting to wane.

But just like those other examples of flashes of IT inflection points, the result is that the technical shift is real and will be impactful. We just cannot completely guess exactly how it will impact the technological landscape, nor the societal one. Many pundits tell us that they know, but they do not. This is a fast, seismic shift, but it is still important to stay as close to the emerging and eventual settling of capabilities into our collective laps.

Even as I say this, there are some use cases for AI (broad sense) that seem to be sticking as real IT value.

We are technologist often get asked about news-worthy tech topics like this. I am sure most of the readers know what I mean when I say this. Any holiday chat would not be complete without a neighbor or relative asking, “What’s all this I hear about AI? Is it really gonna take away my job?” <usually with a nervous, but forced chuckle attached>

To be really honest, I usually punt and say something like it isn’t all that bad. Or, it is pretty cool, actually. Or something benign like that. What do you say?  I mean really. It is an inevitable change to society.

Which brings me to our IT world; and to what the real answer is to our internal question of what AI is going to do for us in Nonstop? What is the full impact to our Nonstop community? I don’t have the answer to that either. However, as a technologist, I can more clearly state that the capabilities are just now being deployed into areas where most of this community understands.

Financial services are enriched and enhanced by leveraging the latest retail and payments AI APIs and protocols. Manufacturing has benefitted from imagery and predictive quality control using AI. These early use cases leverage powerful tools that are demonstrable now and will become commonplace in the next few years.

More broadly, the value to general IT is even more significant right now than it was even just a year ago. Obviously, code generation is a powerful offshoot of the LLM technology; as are document creation and functional analysis from legacy source code and manuals.

As recently as last September, we demonstrated an observability tools suite that included automated AI operational (AIOps) capabilities. We are continuing to assist and enhance AIOps for Nonstop as a current capability with added features being considered for the near future leveraging open APIs and libraries to use the larger AI ecosystem inside of HPE and outside of HPE with cloud services.

Our Nonstop partners continue to innovate in this space, too. Several partner products are delivering ways to leverage AI for both user solutions and for AIOps.

The future is being changed with these AI breakthroughs.  Nonstop is right up front with AIOps and AI interface capabilities now. As more creative AI APIs are exposed, the Nonstop platform and users will benefit.

There is nothing artificial about that.