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Quick Poll: Will Trust Be An Inhibitor to AI Adoption?
A very nuanced question, of course. I saw this ad on a car and thought, "eh, not so sure a human is a better answer. Could be - but not always." I attended the #ARInsights event in San Francisco this week. The final panel discussion focused on how to get started with AI applications and what to expect. More than one panelist raised the issue of trust as a major barrier to adoption. I felt myself disagreeing. Trust has so many caveats. Bottom line, the benefits must outweigh

Julie Ask
22 hours ago2 min read
Topline Enterprise AI Usage Data
The report offers several levels of executive summary. Here is what interested me in the report (not in order of priority): Nearly three-quarters of executives surveyed claim that they already see a positive ROI. That doesn’t necessarily contradict the MIT study that said 95% of pilots failed to scale and deliver an ROI. Chief AI Officer (CAIO) roles are present in 60% of enterprises (technically executives representing enterprises, but too tedious to write each time). Remind

Julie Ask
Nov 102 min read
OpenAI’s Atlas Browser: Cool Technology That Lacks A Compelling User Experience for Consumers Today
Context: OpenAI rolled out its own browser (Atlas) on October 21, 2025 - nearly three years after the launch of its ChatGPT powered by its GPT 3.5 series. It didn’t define a target audience in its announcement - just used loose terms such as “us” and “you.” Core features include a type of omni-present chat interface, browser memory (not tracking), and an agent mode (i.e., a “machine” navigating one or more websites on your behalf). Why would they build their own browser?

Julie Ask
Nov 34 min read


Wealthy Knowledge Workers Use Claude to Augment Their Tasks At Home And Work
Anthropic published “The Anthropic Economic Index report: Uneven geographic and enterprise AI Adoption” on September 15, 2025. You can...

Julie Ask
Oct 103 min read


OpenAI's App Store: Customer Convenience? Or Another Attempt at Disintermediation and World Domination?
Context: On October 6th, 2025 OpenAI held their third (what I assume will be) developers conference. Of the announcements, one has the...

Julie Ask
Oct 102 min read


The Anatomy of Great Speech
Why care about speech quality (i.e., comprehension)? The use of conversational interfaces - voice and text - is on the upswing from...

Julie Ask
Oct 104 min read


GenAI Isn’t Impacting Service CX Dramatically - Yet (AWS Connect Horizons)
GenAI isn't changing consumer service experiences dramatically - yet.

Julie Ask
Oct 82 min read


Buy It In ChatGPT? We’ll See.
OpenAI announced its Agentic Commerce Protocol on September 29, 2025. Consumers will see Instant Checkout (powered by Stripe). What’s...

Julie Ask
Oct 72 min read


Tech Buyers Are Leaning Into LLMs To Research Purchases; Consumers Will Likely Follow
Spotlight AR partnered with Profound to analyze 10,000 real prompts and 15,000 simulated prompts to reverse engineer the impact of GenAI...

Julie Ask
Oct 71 min read


Open AI’s ChatGPT: How Consumers Use The Application
In July of 2025, 700M users were sending 18 billion messages each week. The speed of adoption is unprecedented. About 10% of our global...

Julie Ask
Oct 74 min read


Customer Experiences Must Incorporate Smartphone Capabilities
Google gave us an update of Gemini - their "universal AI assistant" during the Pixel 10 smartphone rollout on August 20, 2025 at a live...

Julie Ask
Sep 84 min read


Are Consumer Experiences Ready for Autonomous AI Agents? No.
In late August, Taco Bell recently announced that their rollout of AI voice assistants to take drive-thru orders had mixed results. It...

Julie Ask
Sep 72 min read


Use AI To Reduce Toil - Not Layoff Employees (AWS Summit 2025)
The AWS Summit in NYC balanced product announcements with customer stories and demos, showing both AI's potential and its current...

Julie Ask
Aug 66 min read
Math On White-Collar Job Elimination?
More articles this past week with headlines around CEOs talking about how AI will eliminate jobs. Latest article in the WSJ on July 3rd...

Julie Ask
Jul 82 min read


AI Customer Service Agents Fail Without Quality Data
In the absence of knowledge or insights based on high quality data, humans may not make the best decisions. I say "may" because they are...

Julie Ask
May 193 min read


Why Are We Obsessed With Virtual Assistants? (Figma's Config 2025)
I had the opportunity to listen to John Lewenstein of Anthropic give a talk at Figma’s Config event in early May 2025 in San Francisco....

Julie Ask
May 152 min read


GenAI Services Will Redefine Personalization
Augie Thumm took over his father’s bike shop (Thumm’s) in my home town of Warren, Ohio when I was just out of college. My parents bought...

Julie Ask
May 153 min read


Anthropomorphism of AI Agents: Yes? No?
There has been a lot of buzz this year surrounding AI Agents - how they code, will replace humans, how humans will manage teams of AI...

Julie Ask
May 142 min read


Should We Outsource Our Thinking To Machines?
I recently reviewed two pieces of academic research on the impact of use of GenAI tools on a human's critical thinking abilities. The...

Julie Ask
Apr 115 min read


A Perspective on CEO Andy Jassy’s (Amazon) 2024 Letter To Shareholders
Amazon (including AWS) is investing heavily (billions - hundreds) in generative AI. This is no secret given its public plans for chips,...

Julie Ask
Apr 114 min read
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