Jess, my wife, and I went shopping at Eaton Center in downtown Toronto recently. Jess was in a very good mood because she just came back from a Hackathon (a 3-day ideation and prototyping competition) her company organized. Jess is a Financial Advisor at a bank in Toronto. She was describing how fantastic (and unreal) all the Artificial Intelligence (AI) ideas and prototypes were as we stopped at a vendor booth to update my phone plan. A lady, named Joanne and probably in her early 20s, welcomed us and suggested a few good options; I signed up for one of her suggestions.

AI is hot, I mean really hot. Consumer companies like Google and Facebook also love AI, with notable apps like Newsfeed, Messenger, Google Photos, Gmail and Search leveraging machine learning to improve their relevance. As a founder of an emerging AI company in the enterprise space, I've been following these recent moves by the big titans closely because they put us (as well as many other ventures) in an interesting spot. How do we position ourselves and compete in this environment? In this post, I'll share some of my thoughts and experiences around the whole concept of AI-First, the "last mile" problems of AI that many companies ignore, the overhype issue that's facing our industry today (especially as larger players enter the game), and my predictions for when we'll reach mass AI adoption. A few years ago, I wrote about the key tenants of building Predictive-First applications, something that's synonymous to the idea of AI-First, which Google is pushing.