This AI Ecosystem Report, featuring supply chain and procurement expert Joanna Martinez, an Acceleration Economy practitioner analyst, features her perspective on the growing issue of AI washing, as recently detailed in a video from fellow analyst and CIO Kenny Mullican.
Highlights
00:29 — Kenny’s warning about the dangers of AI washing — the claim that an application uses AI when it actually doesn’t — really hit home. In the last 18 months, I’ve seen four instances where an application was incorrectly touted to be AI-based. These companies backed off AI claims upon questioning.
01:12 — In each case, claims were being made by C-suite leaders, not uneducated salespeople. The lesson for fellow chief procurement officers (CPOs): when making a purchase on behalf of your company, there are six ways to validate claims:
- Their website should clearly explain what’s available today and what’s not.
- Company representatives should be able to clearly articulate the value AI brings to the product they’re selling and quantify how AI is a differentiator.
- AI-driven apps are unlikely to be a low-cost option because of the costs incurred in building them.
- The company should have significant AI engineering depth and will tout significant new hires in this realm.
- The software should be extracting data from multiple large datasets, which is how it grows smarter over time.
- As Kenny noted, the supplier should be showcasing customers with quantifiable results and you should be speaking to those customers to confirm their results.
