You can’t boil the ocean in the search for AI value

I am currently working hard with my fantabulous colleagues Brook Selassie, Owen Pengelly, Kristin Beard, Meghan Bowen and Nesma Hassan, and a host of wonderful collaborators, putting the final touches on the keynote presentation for Gartner’s Global CIO Leadership Forums. (I know the correct plural of Forum is Fora, but I feel you will judge me as an intellectual snob if I use that.) Forum will be held in Phoenix Feb 26-27. London Mar 12-13. Hollywood Mar 25-26. Sydney Apr 30-May 1, Tokyo Jul 9-10. One of the main themes will relate to finding the true value of AI in your enterprise. Our basic assertion is that you can’t “boil the ocean” looking for AI value, as the old saying goes. Recently, my friend Karsten Scherer pointed me to an old Fast Company article about the phrase “boil the ocean”. It informed me that it was first used by IBM’s ex-CEO Lou Gerstner in his 2002 book, “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance.” That article also does some rudimentary calculations of how much energy it would take to boil the ocean. It estimated that every person on earth would have to do 26 million years consulting to use enough energy to actually boil all the world’s oceans. I felt like the figure wasn’t quite right. Because I am a terribly, terribly broken human being I spent some time on this with Microsoft Excel and ChatGPT early this morning. It turns out that they used a poor estimate of the volume of the world’s oceans, and only estimated the energy required to heat the world’s oceans to boiling point, not the energy to then vaporize it. And they underestimated the energy used in a day’s consulting. I can now proudly tell you that it would take about 3.6 x10^27 joules of energy to boil the world’s oceans. That amount of energy is the same as the caloric intake of seven billion people for six million years. It is equivalent to the annual energy consumption of the USA for nine million years. So, clearly, we must avoid boiling the ocean in search of AI value. Please come and join us at CIO Forum in Phoenix, Hollywood, London, Sydney and Tokyo to find out how. And if it isn’t clear from this post, If you find yourself in close proximity to me at forum, I strongly advise you to take rapid evasive action to avoid the most boring conversation of your life. #unthink #unask #AI #Strategy #Gartner #CIOForum #CIOLeadershipForum