The flawed quest for Artificial General Intelligence – do you need to … efforts in building a culture of deep understanding of the customer.

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It's a mistake to think of "voice" as another interface, warns Phil Wainewright. That's like comparing the early ASP days to what cloud has become: As the history of data center servers has shown, going headless is just the first step on a long journey of increasing disembodiment. Conversational computing is a twenty-five year reset in UIs that will shake up enterprise computing. Phil also sees a fresh opening for messaging systems like Slack. On screen, a messaging layer can be a distraction, but if you're an enterprise worker talking to your interface, who cares what bot is listening as long as they deliver the right service?

Enterprise applications vendor Infor recently showed a concept design for a similar agent, coincidentally also called Max. Project Max … uses intelligent automation across Infor's Sales Suite products to provide timely information, reminders and action prompts to sales reps as they're working out in the field. Now unbundling has reached the field of enterprise applications, due to the combined effect of integrated cloud platforms, smart mobile devices and intelligent agents. Expect to see new models of enterprise organization and teamwork to emerge as new functional bundles of automation enable new ways of working together to achieve business outcomes.

Also see: Cath's two-fer on workplace diversity, Boy jobs and girl jobs – does'tech' put women off a career choice? SapphireNow 2017 roundup – how to get your fix – we published enough content from Sapphire Now to sap even the Sappiest of Saps. I won't do the full tour; here's how to get your info: Jon's grab bag – Not really a grab bag this time, more of a "hope you didn't miss Brian's opus" nudge. Brian just posted the fifth and final part of his epic cloud manufacturing ERP series, The State of Manufacturing ERP – part 5 – The Plex update. You can catch the whole series via Brian's author page, and learn why manufacturing workloads are now shifting to the cloud at a (fairly) rapid rate.

Whilst we may trust Netflix to serve us the content we want, or for Google Maps to predict our routes, or for Spotify to recommend us some songs we may like, when we get to work we revert to manual processes and guesswork." They've been using their crowdsourced – but anonymized – data to provide predictive analytics on their AI platform for more than a decade. I'm not that impressed with predictive at darlings Netflix and Spotify. Meanwhile, some enterprises are getting better at predictive. But what Elkinson says rings true. Consumer tech is forcing the issue (miss you, Alexa, I'll be home soon!). Elkington's got a terrific BS detector for AI blowharding. Barb takes AI in a different but equally exposed direction in The value AI brings to marketing. She argues that AI is set to transform marketing – and marketing isn't ready. Demandware's survey found a monster gap between the impact of AI on marketing and what marketers are skilled to handle. Barb talked to Demandware about the story behind the numbers. One key point: the ability to differentiate on the data science and/or algorithms looks to be fleeting – and will last only until tools either commoditize or become mature. The real differentiator, says Barb, will be the data itself – and that data is hard to come by. As she says: "Whoever can get the most and right data is going to win." Yup – I would only add: "Whoever gets the most opt-in data…" It's about your community willingly sharing data for value. If you get that data at the flea market, or through terms of service smoke/mirrors, you're going to lose that edge – as soon as customers figure out you're just another data panhandler shilling their vitals. Jon's grab bag – Stuart wants to know if the UK government is leaving it to Microsoft to handle the digital skllls crisis. When you see "We have painted ourselves into a corner," and "We are what we are," you know Stuart isn't exactly thrilled. Michelle Swan makes her diginomica debut writing about a professional services firm (in the Salesforce ecosystem) that keeps employee turnover to five percent using the weirdest, wackiest metric you could ever think of: employee happiness. It's also about using data to intervene – in a good way – before things go too far down the ol' crudder. Get your media fix with Stuart's The BBC – wanting to be Netflix? I'm with Stuart: don't try too hard to be Netflix. Netflix isn't exactly the master of great original programming either – from that standpoint they are a sub-par HBO. Finally, welcome ServiceNow to diginomica – good timing given the "servitization" of darned near everything. More somber, Ryan Avent's The Wealth of Humans describes the current era of automation and it's threat to human-labor, kicking up a vision of future thick with a jobless miasma."

It also means the recipients of such tales of fantasy are often thrown off the scent of the story they should be following. Those stories were followed up by one of the most breathtaking pieces of myopic'journalism' I've seen from TechCrunch in quite a while." It would be equally knee jerk to make excuses for one of the true darlings of the enterprise startup crowd, a BI vendor that is positioning itself as "the world's first business cloud." That's the Domo rabbit hole a naive tech journalist can get bamboozled in. You can call Den Howlett a lot of things, but naive tech journalist ain't one of'em. Here he resists the temptation to roast in order to weigh out the pros and cons in detail. But the key is not whether Domo screwed up their PR, but whether they are ready to backup their enterprise ambitions. Den likes the micro-service hub potential, but for now, he's got one eyebrow raised: "I challenge Domo to explain how any service can credibly be called a'business cloud' that manages everything you need without access to the financial information." Scott Cummings, one of our commenters who says he is heavily involved in enterprise sales, adds: "I have yet to meet a paying Domo customer, and those who have tried it have stated it is at best "frosting on the cake" The plot is already thick, my friends….