Solving Previously Unsolvable Business Problems

Long ago and far away, when my research focused on enterprise database systems, middleware, and application development software, I found myself in Houston, Texas on a day-long advisory session with the IT executives of a fossil-fuel energy producer.

I was halfway through my “here’s what we’ll discuss today” slide when the insistent ding of a service bell (???) interrupted me – you know, like the one that the front-desk clerk uses to call the porter to schlep your bags once you’ve reached Kohinoor Diamond Executive status for staying 45 nights in a single year in the same hotel chain. Or if you have yet to reach that travel milestone, think about how paralyzed and speechless Hector Salamanca in “Breaking Bad” communicates his concerns with persistent dings from a service bell mounted on the arm of his wheelchair.

So, when I looked quizzically at the Texas bell-ringer (aka the CIO), he told me, “We have a rule here. Whenever somebody uses a buzzword, we can call you on it. If you can’t give a clear, concise definition of what that word means and why it’s important to us, we will kindly ask you to go back to Cambridge. Do you understand?” I nodded yes, and he asked what I meant by some then important buzzword listed among the topics on my intro slide (it was one of the topics on the t-shirt in the image above). I defined it, gave an example, and explained why it was so important to their strategy. He let me continue. From that point on, I steered clear of all but the most accepted or easily explained buzzwords, jargon, and TLAs ???.

Corporate developers, localization teams, software vendors, and LSPs should take that advice to heart. To that point, I’ve been working my way through an ever-growing pile of “revised due to AI” three-year corporate globalization plans and supplier marketing blurbs, and, of course, the articles and academic papers that chart the evolution of the technology. Each is replete with an assortment of AI, language technology buzzwords, and industry jargon that may go over the heads of decision-makers – or maybe worse yet, simply go unread.

Pick up any random academic article or tech vendor collateral, open to a random page, and point – I always find something there that I must look up. Here are a few potential meeting-stoppers from yesterday’s reading – convolutional neural network, stochastic gradient descent, and k nearest neighbor imputation. Along these lines, it wouldn’t be difficult to pull?together an AI-focused Buzzword Bingo or TLA Bingo game for your next team meeting or vendor call (see the images of Bingo cards above).

Finally, here's my current favorite Buzzword Bingo example from American listener-sponsored public radio in which a software company proclaims that its “AI software enables organizations to use artificial intelligence ??? at enterprise scale ???, solving previously unsolvable business problems ???…LLM ???-agnostic ??? and hallucination-free ???, helping turn the invisible into the obvious???. This is enterprise AI ???.” To be fair, that 100% buzzword-compliant tagline combines a couple of their messages into one, but either one of them would have my Texan CIO dinging at just about every word.

Note: If you rang your service bell while reading this post due to any obscure references , it was probably because you don’t know Hector Salamanca from “Breaking Bad” or how to play bingo. As for the buzzwords and TLAs on the Bingo cards (not to mention on my vendor merch t-shirt), you can look them up in your copious spare time.