Edge Cases-How AI Helps When Stuff Hits the Fan
A new book by Chris Kieff and me
I’m excited to announce I’ve started a new book with Chris Kieff, an angel investor, startup consultant, and my kayaking buddy. He’s a veteran entrepreneur of both Silicon Alley and Silicon Valley where he joined Sprinklr as employee #12 and remained there as it grew to 1700 employees and is currently one of Silicon Valley’s few current success stories.
Chris and I are a great match. While I’ve been writing about tech companies he has been inside of them. For the past five years, I’ve been ghostwriting books for tech executives, and now I will be co-authoring again. This will be the 8th book that has my name on the cover.
Edge Cases—What AI Does When Stuff Hits the Fan was Chris’s idea. I had thought that with 50,000 books about AI already on Amazon, we had missed the window. But then, Chris identified a pain point that most executives recognize.
Lost Money & Customers
The term edge case originates from tech coders to describe a scenario that occurs only at extreme parameters. They occur very rarely thanks to digital technology, but when stuff hits the fan they cost dearly in terms of system failures, lost time, data breaches, and disgruntled customers.
Although he never used the term, Malcolm Gladwell was talking about edge cases when he wrote The Tipping Point. Little things really do make a big difference and when they involve edge cases they can hurt brand, increase costs, and irritate customers.
Now, here comes AI, and there is much hyperbole in the public conversation, and most of those 50,000 books related to how AI will change everything. Chris and I believe that nothing changes everything.
We don’t buy that. Nothing changes everything, but AI will change many things and inevitably edge cases will be among them. Our book will examine how AI will solve many existing edge cases, while simultaneously causing new ones.
Now here comes AI, and a very high noise level promising that AI will either improve everything or destroy it. We don’t believe that everything ever changes, but AI will most certainly change many things and already has started to do so.
Our book will focus on that one issue. AI is a useful tool in resolving many existing edge cases and simultaneously, it will create many new ones, some, of them frustratingly complex and painful for the enterprise decision-makers our book we will target.
Edge Cases will be a useful and pragmatic book that helps readers understand how to use AI to reduce edge cases, making their organizations more efficient. We’ll explain how poorly designed AI implementations will both hurt and help companies in different situations and it will be filled with case studies of how it has been done right or wrong.
We will look at existing best practices and propose better practices thanks to AI.
Wisdom & Questions
I’m a big believer in crowd wisdom. My first book was Naked Conversations, and I was the first author to post an early chapter on social media, soliciting reader feedback. My readers and followers helped me to write a better book, and I have incorporated this practice into my standard authoring process.
Anyone who helps us with ideas, anecdotes, people to interview, fact checks, or even just catching typos will be listed in our Acknowledgements because we believe that little things really do make a big difference.
Let’s start that process now with these four questions:
1. What do you think of our book idea?
2. How can we improve it?
3. Can you point us to an edge case or someone who can help this book?
4. Other.
You can answer here or by old-fashioned email.
Edge Cases will be self-published and self-financed. We are hoping to raise $50,000 in corporate and individual contributions and will be posting about that once we work out options. The money will be used mostly to allow me to work full-time on this book project. Until then, I remain available for other writing projects—except full-length books.