IBM i Shops Are Still Getting Their Generative AI Acts Together

February 5, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the great things about participating in the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey put together by Fortra – and one of the reasons why our beloved colleague Dan Burger helped HelpSystems create the survey a decade ago – was that we get to have input into how the survey is created and how it evolves over time.

During the survey, our host Tom Huntington, executive vice president of technical solutions at Fortra, does an instant poll for attendees, and rather than ask the same question as last year, which was about where people get their information about the IBM i platform and its market, I suggested (in the strong way that I do sometimes, but always with love and affection) that this was not a good question. And I said further that the only question that mattered right now is what IBM i shops thought about generative AI – the chatty kind of AI that is writing code, writing product manuals, and answering customer support calls, among many other tasks – and what they planned to do about it.

Here are the results of the quick poll and the questions I suggested about GenAI at IBM i shops:

This is about what I expected in terms of where IBM i shops are at, and I am comforted to know that as far as I can tell, there are very few enterprises, be they large, medium, or small in size, that have deployed GenAI technologies as part of their applications. So far, GenAI is the arena for the hyperscalers and cloud builders and some 15,000 startups to play in. But, but, but. . . in the not too distant future, we will see how this answer will change. GenAI is going to foment the next wave of automation and augmentation across the application stack.

There is no question about that, and we will be here to track how IBM i shops do it compared to the rest of the world.

One more thing. If you missed the webinar, you can see the survey results and listen to our commentary here, and if you want to read the written report accompanying the survey results, you can download that there.

This Issue Sponsored By

Table of Contents

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search