IT Revolution

For all of April, you can get The Phoenix Project discounted on Audible for Audible Premium Plus members in the US as one of their April Deals. But don't wait—the month will be over before you know it! https://itrev.io/3SRZhCE

When vendors claim autonomous operations are achievable with a bit of historical data and a large language model, it's worth pausing and thinking through the fundamentals. David Ariens and Willem van Lammeren make that case clearly—and push back on the kind of optimism that oversells what the technology can currently do. The assistance phase is delivering real value. The tools are improving every month. But the data foundation is everything, and most organizations haven't built it yet. Their article is a useful gut-check for anyone evaluating industrial AI vendors or roadmaps. https://itrev.io/3Oav7LB

The token pressure I discussed a couple weeks ago at IT Revolution's AI Summit continues to grow. I don't fault Anthropic for building better tools. More so, this feels like "value creep" where user's expectations for Opus output keeps growing.

Vinyl sales up 266% in last 3 years. The digital world is "so last year". I always find the pendulum swing of tastes and preferences intriguing. As humans we tend to go all in, get obsessed, and then get bored and move on. Any number of TikTok trends showcase this idea: the cottage cheese glow up is a great example, as is the Ice Bucket Challenge. Psychologists call this the "hedonic treadmill": we return to baseline no matter how delightful the stimulus was. Research on repeated exposure shows enjoyment drops measurably after just 3-5 exposures to the same content. The graph I created shows that the digital world is losing its signal. We are starting to understand the dangers, the drags, and the emptiness that our dopamine scrolling and digital-first mentality is creating in our lives. We are returning to the physical, to needlepoint, bookstores, vinyl, and pickleball, and to spaces where we are in ACTUAL proximity to each other. We are becoming obsessed with being human again. That leaves me with a question. Are we still creating company experiences that are designed for physical proximity, community, and human connection? Or, is our obsession with AI turning our workplaces into an employee experience akin to Ice Bucket Challenge?

This is a great visual for what a lot of organizations are experiencing right now!

Here's the industrial AI challenge that doesn't get talked about enough: even if you solve the data integration problem, your AI still only sees the digital world. David Ariens and Willem van Lammeren are direct about it—it is simply not possible to use historical data alone to understand the physical twin. You cannot infer physical reality purely from its digital shadow. And as long as that gap exists, there's no replacement for the human operator. This is one of the more honest assessments of where industrial AI actually stands today. https://itrev.io/3Oav7LB

"Autonomy is about people making decisions on their own, based on the objectives of their project or task. After all, if you can’t actually use resources as you need to, then what good are they to you?" —Progressive Delivery by James Governor, Kimberly Harrison, Heidi Waterhouse, and Adam Zimman

The self-driving car analogy is one of the more useful frames for industrial AI. The hard part of autonomous driving is that every intersection is different, conditions change constantly, and unforeseen circumstances are inevitable. Industrial operations face the same challenge. Equipment degrades unpredictably. Raw materials vary batch to batch. And the margin for error in a chemical plant is rather different from that in software deployment. David Ariens and Willem van Lammeren unpack what that analogy really means for the path to autonomous operations. https://itrev.io/3Oav7LB

Flow. Feedback. Continuous learning. These are the Three Ways at the heart of DevOps — and in The Phoenix Project Graphic Novel Vol. 3, Gene Kim and Mike Collins illustrate what it actually looks like when an organization masters them. For leaders who have read the original novel, this final volume offers a new lens. For those coming to the story fresh, it is the most accessible entry point yet to ideas that have reshaped how the industry thinks about IT, operations, and business value. Order your copy now. https://itrev.io/4q9TYvF