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Note 232.2 Competency Circle Business 2 of 2
GYPSC::BADE 113 lines 5-NOV-1990 13:53
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Ladies and Gentlemen,
this is my report to the german ai-competency circle - FYI.
Regards
Dirk Bade
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REPORT ON THE AI-FORUM VII AND CONCURRENT AI MARKETING MEETINGS
VALBONNE OCTOBER 29-31 1990
(DIRK BADE ACT-IS/IT MUNICH)
FLAGS: We have identified a serious bottleneck in corporate
AI product management: Lucid Lisp V4.0 is still not
available for ULTRIX V4.0. This means, we have nothing to
sell with the DECstation 5xxx. VDE V2.0 is again shifted
by 6 months to summer 1991. NEXPERT OBJECT V2.0 is ready
but not delivered by Digital because N.D. didn't supply the
documentation. EPITOOL will stop selling in January 1991.
Only VAX OPS5 and VAX LISP (to be retired) are currently available.
Corporate marketing now favors CSH-agreements over new CMP- DDS- or
Digital products. If this trend continues we may end up with
entirely different product portfolios in different countries.
HIGHLIGHTS: The machine learning presentations & application demos
have clearly shown a possible path to integrate AI-components
into larger applications. Machine learning itself may be seen
as a help to overcome the knowledge engineering gap for expert
systems to some extent. The main message, however, is that we'll
have to identify the applications that gain a competitive
advantage by the integration of AI-technology and then provide
more ready-to-use products for those possibly high volume
applications. The (unexpected) success of our VAX Performance
Advisor product may underline this statement.
TRENDS: Country delegates reported significant interest in integrated
configuration & scheduling applications. Currently the largest
european AI projects with exclusive Digital staff run in
switzerland.
The number of dedicated AI-specialists seems to decrease,
and former AI-specialists are now seen in other support
functions (CASE, Workstations, ULTRIX).
The marketing meetings aimed to find a way to extend the
awareness for the highly successful AI fellowship program,
which is recognized in just small but leading units in our
accounts, towards higher volume departmental and MIS applications.
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Putting AI into the account plans will fail to achieve this goal as
long as we cannot offer more ready-to-use (and ready-to-sell)
products for these applications.
ACHIEVEMENTS: Agenda:
Introduction & Country Delegates Update
AI Product & Strategies (Themis Papageorge)
Industrial Vision Systems (Louis Pau)
AI-IST, Valbonne AI Services (Steve Jones)
GENSYM Products Presentation (Chuck Kiezulas)
Machine Learning Technology (Ed Killeen/Ruby Li)
Hypermedia/MEMEX (Brian Mottershead)
Quintus Prolog/Object Oriented Prolog (M.Langouet)
ILOG Products (P.Albert)
Symbolic Modelling (Ty Chaney)
Scheduling (Chris Wild)
Prolog III (Serge Himbaut)
Emerging Technologies & DPM (J. Fitzgibbon & G. Ristich)
European AI Program Office (E. Orchiuch/M. Reid)
FUTURE: (my personal view)
In contrast to the former view of AI as nearly identical to
expert system technology this forum has shown the move to
a larger variety of possible applications. Our main concern is
that AI-projects as such are still too manpower intensive to
contribute significantly to short-term revenues. In order
to push the integration of AI-technology into higher volume
applications it may become necessary to reposition ourselves
to specialists for particular application domains, such as
- advisory systems in banking & insurance
- configuration & configuration management
- scheduling (see Chris Wild's presentation)
- database (re)design (see RdbExpert)
- systems operation (see VPA, VAXsimPlus)
- intelligent documentation (see ATEM)
- intelligent document retrieval (see Ruby Li's demos)
- vision systems (see Louis Pau's presentation)
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