Mature technologies deliver business value by integration into boring production applications, so AI needs to be boring. This Tech Field Day Podcast episode features Max Mortillaro, Guy Currier, Jay Cuthrell, and Alastair Cooke. AI has frequently been in the public news, many organizations are busy building AI infrastructure and pipelines, and vendors have tagged their applications with AI to ride the hype. Yet, business value is usually delivered in applications that serve customers rather than generating headlines. The first steps towards AI being a functional but boring part of production applications have emerged, with interoperability mechanisms like MCP and A2A are vital steps towards pervasive AI. Options for Small Language Models (SLM) are opening up more cost-effective use of generative AI, while predictive AI continues to be the standard boring production AI. Data and output safety are other areas for development; avoiding GenAI hallucinations, model poisoning, and data leakage is vital for AI to become boring. Eventually, Generative AI will be as invisible and valuable in mainstream business applications, leading to a return on all the current investments.
Panelists
Alastair is a Tech Field Day event lead at the Futurum group, specializing in Cloud, DevOps, and Edge.
Chief Analyst at Visible Impact and Research Director in the Ecosystems, Channels, & Marketplaces practice at The Futurum Group, specializing in AI, DevOps–cloud-native, CPUs-GPUs-xPUs, enterprise applications, and cloud.
Max Mortillaro is an independent data center consultant specializing in virtualization and storage technologies.