MavenSpeak

Agentic AI – Preparing for future workforce & succession planning

Industry is experiencing Agentic AI wave, which is about AI systems possessing certain degree of autonomy to make decisions based on the information they process. Unlike traditional AI tools, agentic AI operates with sense of purpose, executing tasks without constant human supervision.

These systems are designed to interact with their environment, adapt to changes, and achieve specific goals, making them highly suitable for dynamic applications. Agentic AI tops up AI implementation with combined techniques like reinforcement learning, vision computing and natural language processing to optimize decision-making and interaction capabilities.

To GenAI or Not To GenAI

Generative AI is new kid in the block, and it is drawing loads of attention. Every business has been talking and thinking about how it can leverage Generative AI in their business. Quick to implement business cases such as summarizing a document, generating common content or enabling natural language search to produce results have been experimented or implemented by many organizations.

While enterprises are yet to adapt it in full strength, leaders such as Microsoft, Google and Salesforce have already started releasing offerings such as M365 Copilot, Google Duet AI and Salesforce Einstein Copilot. Many other leaders are planning to either build their own or use one built by leaders to enable Generative AI capabilities in their products. While the focused groups have moved ahead in their AI strategy – it is just a small portion and vast majority of the enterprises are still trying to make sense of this new trend and understand what it means for their business. Beyond curiosity play, the Generative AI use cases also need to follow a structured approach and follow the suite of mainstream implementations.

Optimize hosting cost with serverless computing

Enterprise transformation is a continuous process, it is vital to address business imperatives. Typical business imperatives involve performance excellence, cost excellence and operational excellence – digital initiatives continue to play important role in most of these transformations. Such organization needs can be addressed by the five pillars of well-architected framework. All cloud leaders unanimously agree on these five pillars, they can be described as below:

Cost Optimization – maximizing value of deliverable
Performance Efficiency – being able to step up to customer needs
Operational Excellence – ensure lights are always on
Reliability – being able to recover from failures and continue to function
Security – protecting information system from threats

While all the pillars are important, this write-up is specifically focused on cost optimization. For our discussion, consider deployment of a typical two-tiered web application, it requires at least a web server and database server. For simplicity, container based deployment is not considered though it’s a good candidate for cost reduction.

Let us consider an application with 1 million hits per month, 99.95% availability requirement and steady traffic. Such an application would require two web servers behind load balancer and an active-passive database deployment at minimum. For simplicity let us presume all the costs for other components remain same throughout. The tired redundant web/database deployment approach such as this one using general purpose compute options to support moderate traffic would cost approximately $500 to $600 per month. This is considering a 2 vCPU and 8 GB RAM instance which approximately costs $150 per instance (rounded to closest number for reader convenience).

Continue reading “Optimize hosting cost with serverless computing”

Expect RPA to be occasionally in-accurate, plan for uncertainty

Any IT driven automation depends on sanity of input to produce sensible output. RPA can produce consistent results as long as underlying application interfaces are not changing frequently. Certain enterprise application functions have sporadic changes, while some may change frequently. There also might be uncertainty input cases from day one such as different document formats from vendors/partners. Plan your RPA implementation accordingly.

Continue reading “Expect RPA to be occasionally in-accurate, plan for uncertainty”

Never outshine application business logic

Reliable systems that produce trust worthy results are foundation to efficient business operations. One of the best ways to be consistent in IT systems outcome is to practice single source of truth. To be consistent and meaningful, data must be subjected to change using same set of business logic. Enterprises practice single location business logic implementation using either specialized systems such as ERP or through objective driven custom implementation. Duplication is avoided by ensuring same functionality is not implementation in more than one application. When business logic changes this approach ensures changes are isolated to specific application. This practice must be retained even in case of RPA implementation. The BOTs or RPA processes should mimic workforce and never try to outshine applications by duplicating their business logic. Such an implementation make system vulnerable to change.

Continue reading “Never outshine application business logic”