I notice that seemingly every SaaS product is “AI-powered,” whatever that means. Usually, this is denoted by a group of stars glittering like AI fairy dust.
The other day, I chatted with friends about data and AI products. I pushed back and asked, “What does a product have to do with data or AI”? If a product uses data or AI, it’s there to serve the functionality and utility of the product, not the other way around.
It got me thinking about an early 1950s-era clock I own. It has a plastic shell, a novel substance in consumer goods back then. But I can’t imagine the manufacturer advertising the clock as a “plastic clock.” It’s just a clock that happens to include some plastic.
I think it’s essential for practitioners and product managers to understand how to use data and AI to create better products. But I don’t believe the end customer cares whether a product is “AI-powered.” People want products that work.
Hope you have a fun weekend!
Thanks,
Joe
P.S. If you haven’t done so, please sign up for Practical Data Modeling. There are lots of great discussions on data modeling, and I’ll also be releasing early drafts of chapters for my new data modeling book here. Thanks!
Cool Weekend Reads
Nvidia’s Explosive Growth Masks AI Disillusionment
Detecting hallucinations in large language models using semantic entropy (Nature)
How Slack Uses Apache Kafka at Scale (X)
What Goes Around Comes Around... And Around...
Meta drops '3D Gen' bomb: AI-powered 3D asset creation at lightning speed (VentureBeat)
Building and scaling Notion’s data lake (Notion)
A Eulogy for DevOps (Mat Duggan)
An Antidote to the Cult of Self-Discipline (The Atlantic)
15 Life and Work Principles from Jensen Huang (Creator Economy)
Serving a billion web requests with boring code (llimllib notes)
New Content, Events, and Upcoming Stuff
The Joe Reis Show
This week…
Steve Macleod - The Importance of Operational Data Modeling (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - F*ck Around and Find Out, AI Edition (Spotify)
In case you missed it…
The Finnish Data Mafia - What’s Up With Data in Finland? (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - Mixed Model Arts (Spotify)
Nick Freund - Closing a Startup (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - “Success” (Spotify)
Doug Needham - Architecture Deep Dive, The Hard Work of Generative AI in the Enterprise, and more (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - WTF is a “Data Team”? (Spotify)
5 Minute Friday - Don’t Be A D*ck (Spotify)
Juha Korpela - Conceptual Data Modeling Deep Dive (Spotify)
Bill Inmon - History Lessons of the Data Industry. This is a real treat and a very rare conversation with the godfather himself (Spotify) - PINNED HERE.
Monday Morning Data Chat
Note: Matt Housley and I are taking the Summer off from the Monday Morning Data Chat. We will be back in the Fall with an incredible new lineup.
That said, we have a special episode dropping soon with Wes McKinney and Nick Schrock. Stay tuned!
In case you missed it…
Zhamak Dehghani + Summer Break Special (Spotify, YouTube)
Chris Tabb - Platform Gravity (YouTube)
Ghalib Suleiman - The Zero-Interest Hangover in Data and AI (Spotify, YouTube)
Bart Vandekerckhove - Data Security Deep Dive (Spotify, YouTube)
Yali Sassoon - Using LLMs to Support the Analytics Workflow (Spotify, YouTube)
David Yaffe & John Kutay - The State of Streaming and Change Data Capture (Spotify, YouTube)
Events I’m At
(Taking the Summer off, sort of…)
USA and virtual events - TBA
Big Data London - September 18-19. Register here
DataEngBytes (Australia) - Late September/Early October, TBA
Helsinki Data Week - Fall TBA
Much more to be announced soon…
Thanks! If you want to help out…
Thanks for supporting my content. If you aren’t a subscriber, please consider subscribing to this Substack.
Would you like me to speak at your event? Submit a speaking request here.
You can also find me here:
Monday Morning Data Chat (YouTube / Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts). Matt Housely and I interview the top people in the field. Live and unscripted.
My other show is The Joe Reis Show (Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts). I interview guests on it, and it’s unscripted and free of shilling.
Practical Data Modeling. Great discussions about data modeling with data practitioners. This is also where early drafts of my new data modeling book will be published.
Fundamentals of Data Engineering by Matt Housley and I, available at Amazon, O’Reilly, and wherever you get your books.
Be sure to leave a lovely review if you like the content.
Thanks!
Joe Reis