Enterprise AI is waiting for its Transformer moment
The first wave transformed individual work. The second will transform the organization itself.
As a professor of innovation, there’s a slide in my deck I use every time I start a session on artificial intelligence: a fragment of the first page from the “Attention Is All You Need” paper, from 2017. I use just a fragment because I don’t want the students to read it… I usually refrain from using a lot of academic papers when I teach MBAs and executives: they tend to be boring, and this one is no exception and is not particularly easy to read. However, it is historic. Written by eight Google researchers, it is the paper that defines the Transformer architecture, which among other things, became the architecture behind GPT and much of the subsequent generative-AI wave. The rest, as I said, is history.
