Trusting AI: evaluation as engineering discipline

For decades, software quality has been a solved organizational problem, or at least a well-understood one. Teams write tests. Tests run automatically. When a change breaks something, the pipeline catches it before it reaches production. This discipline, built up painfully over thirty years of software engineering practice, is why modern development teams can ship multiple … Read more

From copilot to colleague: the rise of agentic AI

Since the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022, artificial intelligence in the enterprise has been fundamentally assistive. AI systems have answered questions, generated suggestions, summarized documents and flagged anomalies. Humans have long remained firmly in control of every consequential action. The AI provided input; the person made the decision and pressed the button. This was a … Read more

Democratizing expertise: when technology removes the gatekeepers

One of the most powerful effects of technology isn’t that it makes things faster or cheaper; it’s that it fundamentally changes who gets access. For decades, access to expertise has been constrained by geography, cost and availability of professionals. If you needed medical advice, psychological support or even something as seemingly simple as a vision … Read more

Becoming an AI-first software-intensive company

Over the past decades, software-intensive systems companies have gone through several major paradigm shifts. We moved from hardware-centric products to software-defined systems, from waterfall to Agile, from projects to products and now superset platforms, and from episodic releases to continuous deployment. When each of these shifts became relevant, it was initially resisted and, intentionally or … Read more

The AI-driven company: conclusion

Over the last months, this series has explored the transition toward becoming an AI-driven company, with a particular focus on software-intensive systems industries such as automotive, industrial automation, telecommunications, energy and manufacturing equipment. These sectors face a unique constellation of challenges: long product lifecycles, safety-critical functions, complex supply chains, heterogeneous technology stacks and deeply embedded … Read more

The AI-driven company: AI-first products

In the final stage of the AI-enabled product maturity ladder, we cross a conceptual threshold. Instead of extending traditional products with AI capabilities, we design AI-first products. These are conceived around data and machine learning from the outset. Instead of being bolted on as an afterthought, AI is the core. AI-first products differ fundamentally from … Read more

The AI-driven company: continuous ML

Continuous ML is the fourth stage of our AI-enabled product maturity ladder. Here, models and systems don’t merely adapt occasionally; they improve continuously as new data becomes available. This represents a fundamental shift from periodic updates to ongoing evolution and systems that are learning and improving continuously. In order for this stage to be realized, … Read more

The AI-driven company: multi-ML

In the multi-ML stage on the AI maturity ladder for products, we move from individual to collective intelligence. Instead of relying on one model, we engineer systems composed of multiple machine learning models that work together to deliver complex functionality. As an example, a smart assistant system needs to integrate several ML models, such as … Read more