For 25 Years, Wikipedia Trained AI. Now it Wants Payback
Wikipedia’s partnerships with Microsoft, Meta, Perplexity, Mistral, and Amazon have ushered it into the AI era.
- By Gary Cokins
The old organizational model for decision making is broken. The jig is up. Making decisions relying on gut feeling, intuition, office politics, past experience and bias is giving way to using fact-based information and analytics. These allow for investigation, insights, foresight, and improvements.
Predictable skepticism of business analytics
Some readers may already be reacting to my observations and saying to themself, “I’ve heard this exaggerated story before.” Skepticism is a healthy virtue. Skepticism involves waiting for enough evidence before accepting or believing.
My belief in the value of analytics began at an early age. Math came easily to me in grade school. I enjoyed solving story problems. I created my own dice baseball game and kept team and player statistics. I liked to measure things, including time and distance.
But my advocacy of analytics had a personal and punctuated advance early in my adult career. Following a series of job promotions in a manufacturing
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Gary Cokins
Gary Cokins is an internationally recognized expert, speaker, and author in advanced cost management and performance improvement systems. He is the founder of Analytics-Based Performance Management, an advisory firm located in Cary, North Carolina at www.garycokins.com . Gary received a BS degree with honors in Industrial Engineering/Operations Research from Cornell University in 1971. He received his MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in 1974.
Gary began his career as a strategic planner with FMC’s Link-Belt Division and then served as Financial Controller and Operations Manager. In 1981 Gary began his management consulting career first with Deloitte consulting, and then in 1988 with KPMG consulting. 1992 Gary headed the National Cost Management Consulting Services for Electronic Data Systems (EDS) now part of HP. From 1997 until recently Gary was in business development with SAS, a leading provider of enterprise and corporate performance management (EPM/CPM) and business analytics and intelligence software.
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