Microsoft unveils big-data-capable SQL Server 2019 and extended AI capabilities to power data-driven innovation. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella set the tone at the September 24-27 Ignite events in Orlando by sharing at least half a dozen stories of leading companies innovating and pioneering new business models with the aid of artificial intelligence (AI). It was a crisp, one-hour presentation long on vision and surprisingly short on promotion or even mentions of the significant technology announcements that followed. Nadella warned the more than 30,000 attendees that the ability to innovate and drive new business models is as much or more about changing corporate cultures and business processes as it is about applying technology. And when the technology decisions are ready to be made, Nadella counselled executives to know which capabilities are commodities and which warrant custom development to drive differentiation.

Among the many companies investing in artificial intelligence, there is one surprisingly exclusive group: companies that generate value from AI. And right now, at least, the odds against gaining admission are sobering. According to a survey of more than 2,500 executives - conducted for a new report by MIT Sloan Management Review, BCG Gamma, and BCG Henderson Institute - seven out of ten companies report minimal or no gains so far from their AI initiatives. Why do some efforts succeed, but many more fail? The only one that struck me was #3.

Microsoft unveils big-data-capable SQL Server 2019 and extended AI capabilities to power data-driven innovation. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella set the tone at the September 24-27 Ignite events in Orlando by sharing at least half a dozen stories of leading companies innovating and pioneering new business models with the aid of artificial intelligence (AI). It was a crisp, one-hour presentation long on vision and surprisingly short on promotion or even mentions of the significant technology announcements that followed. Nadella warned the more than 30,000 attendees that the ability to innovate and drive new business models is as much or more about changing corporate cultures and business processes as it is about applying technology. And when the technology decisions are ready to be made, Nadella counselled executives to know which capabilities are commodities and which warrant custom development to drive differentiation.

Prefer to watch – here is my event video … (if the video doesn't' show up – check here) Here is the 1 slide condensation (if the slide doesn't show up, check here): Event Report - Dreamforce 2018 - Where is the Innovation from Holger Mueller Want to read on? Here you go: Salesforce and Apple partner. At first glance, enterprises love it when market leaders' partner, especially when they are joint customers. With Salesforce committing to build iOS specific apps, taking advantage of iPhone features, moving closer to Swift – is a big favor to Apple. The concern for CIOs is – Salesforce is creating two classes of mobile users.

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?

Quotage: "We are still decades from Star Trek-style artificial general intelligence that could pass the Turing test or outperform humans on a gamut of unrelated cognitive tasks. In the meantime, a promising compromise would be the ability to automate model selection and tuning based on the problem and available data, and then select the best options from a portfolio of deep learning software each designed for different applications." Thus the theme of Marko's useful offering, which gets into the practicalities of "automated algorithm selection," where the proper algorithm for a narrower use case is machine-determined. I can see why Marko argues that helping companies sort the right algorithms could make up for lack of internal data science expertise. More APIs and "metadata taxonomies" are needed.

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….