It DOES NOT matter. It’s ALL AI-Bullcr@p! Every last instance!
Vendors still won’t admit that AI is the new gold-standard for tech failure, including Procure-Tech, as evidenced by the fact that tech failure rates have shot up to an all-time high of 88% (see Two and a Half Decades of Project Failure). Nor will they admit that even if they have tech that works, that it’s not the be-all and end-all (because, as far as they are concerned, it’s going to slice, dice, and make virtual julienne fries of your data just like a good AI should) and may not be the right solution for you.
But those with any modern tech at all know that a lot of vendors out there claiming “AI” don’t have anything close to deserving the AI label, that they can blame all the failures on those vendors (because they are obviously the new silicon snake oil salesmen, right?), and are now trying to win the AI marketing war by claiming whatever phrasing their competition is using, or not using, proves that their opponent doesn’t have good tech, and definitely doesn’t have AI.
But it’s all bullcr@p, because all of the phrasing is bullcr@p, most of the vendors don’t have anything close to what should be considered AI, and, most of the time, it doesn’t matter whether or not the vendor has AI, only if the vendor’s tech solves your problems.
To make this clear, let’s look at each term, what some vendors say the term means, and why their definition is meaningless.
| Term | Vendor Definition | What it Actually Means |
| AI-Enabled | core features incorporate AI | the vendor has injected a few analytical algorithms, but no guarantee they are actually advanced or anything close to what you should expect from AI |
| AI-Enhanced | AI is added to the interface to give you the AI experience | the vendor has wrapped a Gen-AI LLM (like Chat-GPT) to give you a meaningless conversational interface |
| AI-Backed | AI is at the core of one or more functions | one or more parts of the app are built around an algorithm the vendor is calling AI |
| AI-Powered | External AI has been integrated to power our tech | the vendor has wrapped Chat-GPT and integrated it directly into their app (letting unpredictable and undependable code run parts of the app) |
| AI-Driven | AI has been built into the workflow and runs (part of) the app | the vendor has decided to let AI control the application (for better or worse) and determine what algorithms to run, when, and why |
| AI-Native | the entire infrastructure was built to support AI | the vendor has built the entire application to support integration with AI systems (and may not have built any actual functionality) |
Moreover, if you read any statements about how an infrastructure needs to be purpose built from the ground up to “serve data to AI models“, that’s an even bigger pile of bullcr@p because no application works unless it can serve data to the models it is based on, whether classical or modern or “AI”. All applications take in data, process it, and spit it out, so claiming that you need to build a special architecture to support AI is complete and utter bullcr@p.
Always remember the reality that:
- true AI doesn’t exist (as no software is intelligent)
- advanced algorithms do exist, but just slapping an AI label on an algorithm doesn’t make it any more advanced than it was yesterday
- not just any advanced algorithm will do, it has to be appropriate to your problem
- you don’t always need an advanced algorithm, you need one that gets the results you need
And then you can see through the vendor bullcr@p and focus in on finding a vendor with a solid solution that actually solves your problem, regardless of whether the vendor claims AI or not.