Category: Blog

by Tony Palladino We are living in an amazing time period, as we witness the meteoric evolution of AI. It reminds me of the Pink Floyd song, Welcome to the Machine. (Fun fact: they recorded that song’s intro using the sound made from an electric shaver.) The concept behind that song has much to do with the machine, invented by mankind, eventually consuming humanity. In today’s world, the machine has evolved quickly, about 2x every two years according to Moore’s Law. Now, the bright and shiny object is Generative AI. How long will AI hold its luster? Where are we…

by Tony Palladino If you’re a technology sales & services leader, then this is meant for you. . . . I appreciate your position. You have a number to hit, and I’m sure that you have put together a solid plan to achieve your objectives. Having been a tech sales leader for many years myself, I’ve checked that box as well. Then, one day I figured out how to scale my business to 5x growth. Yes, 5x – and more than once. The first time, it took me a few years to deliver 5x and eventually 7x growth, from $15M…

by Tony Palladino Senior Sales Leaders love to talk about the topic of establishing and maintaining a winning sales culture. As a senior sales leader, myself, I enjoy the topic so much that I decided to write about it. So, from my POV…. To me, it starts with the Team. Hiring and developing the sales team to deliver a high-performance day in and day out is the path to a winning sales culture. Hiring “A” players up-front is the fastest path to having a winning sales culture. In fact, without “A” players there cannot be a winning sales culture. For…

by Tony Palladino In the world of start-ups, entrepreneurs spend much of their energy seeking funding from the investor community, as well as from friends and family. While they would likely prefer to focus their energy on building a solid product, the smart founders recognize the high priority around running and sustaining their business. For the lucky ones, this can involve multiple fundraising sprints over several years. To “cross the chasm” as it relates to their product adoption in the marketplace, founders can lean on various different types of financial investment instruments, such as a Convertible Note, or a Simple…

by Bill Franks What’s coming up in the world of AI and data science in 2024? I’ll provide my thoughts here. I haven’t done a blog with predictions for a number of years, so I thought I’d give it a go and see if people find it valuable or not. These are just my opinions, and at least one is a bit risky, but hopefully these thoughts will either reinforce your own or spur some new ones.   Prediction 1: Deepfakes Will Become A Huge Mess I first talked about deepfakes in 2018. With deepfake technology being better and cheaper than ever,…

by Tony Palladino I am enjoying an illustrious career as a sales revenue leader. I’ve been asked more than once, “If I had to pick one thing, what would I say is the best way to drive the most sales revenue?” It’s an easy question that has many possible answers, such as focus, hire the best, listen to your customers, executive alignment. My answer is simple, yet it encompasses all of these attributes: Think Big! I’d like to share with you a couple of stories that will demonstrate how I “Think Big” to deliver stellar results. Perhaps these examples will…

by Tony Palladino Emirates Team New Zealand wins the 36th Americas Cup title with help from AI In early 2019, Emirates Team New Zealand set out to defend their Americas Cup title. Before building the ultra-expensive racing yacht for the 36th Americas Cup in 2021, the team embarked on a new strategy employing AI technology. For two years, the team worked with their strategic partner, McKinsey/Quantum Black, to develop AI models using Amazon Sagemaker, running in AWS cloud. The team developed and trained AI machine learning models to generate tens of thousands of racing yacht “digital twins” – before they…

by Bill Franks While historically, there are always misunderstandings about a new technology or methodology, it seems to be even worse when it comes to generative AI. This is in part due to how new generative AI is and how fast it has been adopted. In this post, I’m going to dive into one aspect of generative language applications that is not widely recognized and that makes many use cases I hear people targeting with this toolset totally inappropriate. A Commonly Discussed Generative AI Use Case Text based chatbots have been around for a long time and are now ubiquitous…