The New Automation Mindset: The Leadership Blueprint for the Era of AI-For-All by Vijay Tella.
Vijay Tella is Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder at Workato. He was the former Vice President, Mobile Video at Skype, and Chief Executive Officer at Qik. Vijay holds a MS in Computer Science from University of California, Los Angeles
The goal of this book is certainly to help organizational leaders understand automation as a blueprint for embracing AI. In fact, a great start to this book begins with the impression of AI and why 90% of AI deployments fail. This will obviously grab the attention of orgnaizational leaders.
Then Vijay addresses Toast. Yes, the credit card service deployed in restaurants, not the one you have with butter at breakfast. This is a service I have deployed and Vijay documents how different Toast is today for restaurants since the pandemic.
In fact, Toast was forced to pivot during the pandemic and as a result became a solid performer and model for other AI vendors to follow. In his outline “Many Restaurants Would Have Been Toast Without Toast” shows the insights recognized and implemented. Vijay returns to Toast’s pivot in the closing chapters.
Orchestration
Orchestration is well explored in Chapter 5. The outline for the building blocks includes people, process, and data. There are technical capabilities required for a successful orchestration. The key elements are event-driven workflows, interoperability with other automation tools deployed within the organization and then leans into AI to improve workflows. Vijay outlines the clear benefits of Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset.
IT Governance ? Yes.
In fact, his insights into IT Governance should not be overlooked. This will also be impacted by post pandemic IT Governance requirements within multiple regulatory and data compliance mandates. Vijay provides a good set of IT Governance success stories including Atlassian. However, Vijay also moves IT Governance into our new era of AI. This is also linked to Chapter 15: The Enterprise AI Platform.
There are insights to how Shadow IT can derail an organization. While few organizations have the talent to pull off Shadow IT projects, there is a much greater risk for organizations with a destructive culture that permits Shadow IT. Yet Vijay will quote Steve Jobs and while it may be inspirational, it will fall flat more often.
AI automation is emerging
In conclusion, The New Automation Mindset is an insightful book demonstrating the automation benefits of AI. There are deep insights to business operators and Vijay outlines multiple instances of AI including Generative AI and AI robotics that will impact manufacturing organizations.