FIR 141: Use Tech Half-Life To Grow Your Business !!

Financial Investing Radio

Hey in this episode we take a look at how you can use the technology half-life to build your business.

Everybody, welcome to another episode of click AI radio. So thinking about half life, technology half life, what does that mean your business? And how quickly are things changing? It's interesting in terms of the you know, different organizations have different views on how fast things are changing sort of the, the sort of the pop culture, if you will, of technology tends to treat it like things are changing quickly. And that and that that certainly feels that way for lots of us. It's interesting, though, to see the different viewpoints on it. Let's let's take a quick look at this. So here's one and that this comes from culture.io. Right, they talked about how digital transformation is more successful with a positive shift in culture, in fact, goes on to say 80% of enterprises will change their culture as a way to accelerate their digital transformation strategy. That's actually a Gartner statement. So the point here is that, hey, if if you are if technology is changing a lot, and it's, you know, impacting your business, you better change your culture.

Alright, let's check off the box for the culture statement. Let's move on from here. So how fast is technology changing? Or what pace or rate are things changing? Singularity hub.com has got this interesting viewpoint where they they show the growth in the DNA sequence data over years, right, where they show the Internet backbone bandwidth over you know, over the years, all of these are course up and to the right in terms of you know, what we see on the graph, right? Or the number of bits per second, you know, over the years, right, or the number of bits per second per dollar, right? So you end up getting more and more, more and more data for your dollar. Alright, so these logarithmic charts come from Ray Kurzweil Neil's 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near right, and it's attempting to show that certain things are growing exponentially. All right. However, there's other views. This comes from itI, f.org. They've gotten an opposing view, they're they're making comments like, Well, wait a minute, is a really changing that quick. They make this comment, they say, Look, if technological change actually were speeding up, one would expect to see an increase in patents and productivity, but we don't. All right, they also go on to say from 2006 to 2015, US utility patents increased just 3.8% per year. And then they go on to talk about productivity, growth, so the productivity improvements of labor. So from 1980, in the US productivity, annual annual productivity growth in US was about 1.5% 1995 was up 2.5%. And, and from 2007, and 2017.

It was only 1%, which is interesting, showing that the actual productivity, even though all these new technological wizardry, cool things are around us, as our productivity actually increasing. Well, they go on to make this interesting comment. I'm just going to read this right here. They make this point right here, they say, look, many technologies today are nowhere near half patent or penetrating half of the American homes a decade after they first commercialized. So they go on to point out that Fitbits came out in 2007. You know, consumer 3d printers in 2010, VR 3d goggles, 2015, none of them are anywhere near 50% market penetration. So the question is, well, so Alright, maybe maybe there's this increase of many new different types of technologies, but in terms of their adoption, and the impact in our lives and making us more productive. These guys are arguing that it's not really making a difference there. What is changing or growing fast, and this comes according to hosting tribunals. dot com, they have an interesting set of stats, he pointed out that what is growing is things like, like the number of smart devices, right? As well as the number of hosting services and, and and the number of websites, right and the amount of data and those are things that all tend to be increasing and growing, what up to almost 2 billion websites now. But some say that, that can only 75% of those websites aren't active. And so while there's still a lot of stuff out there and a lot of data growing, the real question is, is it making us more productive? And is it doing more for us and helping us to become better? What we are getting is a lot more data. So here's something from MIT, MIT said, Look, when it comes to changes, right, in terms of the amount of changes that are taking place, from their perspective, they felt like it's varies based on the industry. So it says from a low 2% per year for the mechanical skin can you know skin hair treatment, skin treatment, hair removal wrinkles, to a high of 216% per year for the dynamic information exchange and support systems. Their point is this. The rate of change from 2% to 216% varies across different industry. So one industry might see tons of new technologies, new changes, whereas the other hardly sees anything changing or it's changing very slowly. And even if things are changing, are they really making things better? Well, here's one of the challenges. With the increase in terms of numbers of technologies and things that are out there again, things have to be adopted to really make a difference.

The one thing that folks are seeing is that there's a half life, that's taking place, there's a half life of the technology because of the numbers of things that are changing. So in general, we see that their half life is going down. And the other thing that's that's happening in terms of Half Life is around the skills of the people. And so this comes from emeritus.org blog, there talks about the half life of employee skills. I'm just going to quote here, World Economic Forum research in 2017, said that the half life of a skill is about five years, that was in 2017. And then by the end of 2021, was estimated to be down to four years now that those were just employee skills in general, some feel that the that that number is lower for technology skills, I've seen some folks say it's down to even three years. So if the half life of your technology skills, let's say that it is around three years, so you spend your time as an organization, you you're investing in the technological skills, so you're going to use technology to help compete, but the half life is, let's say three years for that. What that means is of course got to keep keep ahead of that curve. And as a small to medium business owner that starts to become fairly expensive value proposition. Here's, here's another piece right here, it says of the existing 25 million software developers 50% will witness the half life phenomenon to their skills. So means that without additional upskilling, only about 12 point 5 million of them are going to be suitable for jobs that we need to have them do by 2025.

So that's a shortfall of about 18 point 5 million jobs. Alright, let me say it another way. So you're small to medium business owner, you're trying to use technology to be competitive, but the half life of technology is reducing whether or not it's making you more productive. That's another argument, as well as the half life of the skills of the people to bring the technology down to three to four years, that starts to become really expensive. So while it can be argued that the technological pace of change varies in different industries, it can also be argued that access to the skilled teams to leverage AI for your business is like fighting a drying or fight fighting around a drying waterhole in the Sahara Desert, right? It means that, you know, less and less water, you know, everyone's fighting for the last little bits or drops of it. As an SMB owner, though, I'm going to suggest that it's critical to not play the game of building your AI technology team using your scarce resources. So what I am suggesting, though, is that with the advent of democratized AI, and there's a bunch of platforms out there, like with ClickAI and able with Plainsight AI, who I've had them on here, before, you know you should take advantage of these platforms. And the benefit is that you abstracting the AI complexities away from you, while delivering the benefits and the values that AI has to offer. So the argument is this, given the democratization of AI that's available given the half life of skills for the people and the half life of technology itself, why would you do or take another approach without using democratized AI? So as always start with your business use cases and then of course, leverage democratize AI rather than investing in technologies with with you know, such a short to HalfLife Alright everybody, thanks for joining and until next time, spend your half life wisely.

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