SOFTWARE

Illustration: Brittany Holloway-Brown, Photos: Adobe Stock

Like broccoli on a finicky toddler’s dinner plate, AI features in business software are often left untouched.

According to a recent Banyan Software report, 51% of business software operators saw fewer than one in four customers use the AI capabilities that shipped with a software product. The findings are based on more than 260 survey responses from founders and CEOs of software companies that focus on vertical markets (i.e., specific industries).

What’s the cause? Max Risen, Banyan Software’s president of M&A, told IT Brew the low usage rates of AI features likely stem from companies “building for the sake of building and not necessarily building to solve specific problems.”

Risen added, “They’re building things that they think are really cool that customers will want, but more often than not, we found that they’re missing the mark of actually driving customer value.”

User not found.—BM

      

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IT OPERATIONS

Getty Images

Debt’s no laughing matter—especially when it involves the data a company needs to make decisions and build AI tools.

Aaron McCray, field CISO and executive technology strategist at IT provider CDW, defines data debt as “poorly classified, overly permissioned, and unmeshed data that’s grown exponentially over the years.” When organizations don’t have the necessary visibility and management tools to wrangle their data, that debt can become a serious problem.

McCray suggested that most organizations “typically only use about 30% of their data, and the remaining 70% is often unstructured.” That can sometimes lead to issues for the IT team: Some 94% of organizations are struggling to manage their unstructured data, according to a survey of 1,000 companies in the US, UK, France, and DACH (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) regions by Nasuni.

All roads lead to AI. McCray said that issues with data governance at most organizations extend beyond automated tools and platforms, touching fundamentals such as how an enterprise stores and classifies its data.

Never break the (data) chain.—CN

      

IT OPERATIONS

Lorilyn McCue

What do aviation and product management have in common? In both cases, you’re trying to keep a complicated thing running.

Lorilyn McCue would know. Prior to her decade-long run in the product management world, McCue started out her career in the US Army, where she flew Apache helicopters all around the world.

“I got to fly around the States. I got to fly in Korea. I flew in Iraq for a year, and that was like a pretty cool job,” McCue said.

McCue—now an AI product manager for AI productivity company Superhuman—said being a pilot and a project manager both have an adventurous feel and evoke the feeling of “going into the unknown.”

Been there, done that!—BM

      

patch notes

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top IT reads.

Stat: $5. That’s the electricity cost for the first half-hour flight by a battery-electric aircraft the size of a “small regional airliner.” (Ars Technica)

Quote: “In China, these things are just walking around the streets…They have so much more experience than we do.”—Teddy Haggerty, founder of Robo Inc., on the challenges facing US production of humanoid robots (the New York Times)

Read: The US court system will begin publicly disclosing how often judges authorized US government use of hacking tools and spyware in wiretaps—in 2029. (TechCrunch)

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