Technology is a tool, not an end in itself — My Mission Possible For 2020
As we approach the end of 2019, I see lots of my dear colleagues and friends summing up their work journey over the last 12 months and setting themselves for the 2020 challenges.
Inspired by it, I decided to do something similar. To write down my professional goals I have for Untrite and Japana (my side business, eCommerce — I share my learnings here) and hold myself accountable. I hope to look back at this post at the end of 2020 and feel at peace that I’ve ticked most of what I planned for that year. Or at least that I tried.
2019 was a very intense, stressful but at the same time — rewarding year. I’ve had the chance to meet many inspirational people. But the most exciting was to learn about challenges that the people face in workplaces— and understand that we can help them. I always thought that technology is a tool, not an end in itself. It’s not “companies”, but people who deal with everyday’s challenges. And it’s usually around accessing knowledge and making a good use of data. That’s in 2019 we focused on development of our core ML-powered platform helping people access valuable information hold within enterprise from one place (a.ka one point of truth) to get their job done more efficiently. Think intelligent and not annoying Clippy :).
I won’t go into detail in this post because I’m writing it at 18:27 on 31st, still undressed for a tonight’s party (Ah those deadlines :)
So here are my main 2020 goals related to Untrite:
- Launching a podcast on AI — AI in Action (name not decided yet) and if time and logistics allow — YT interviews with people who work with ML and AI and contribute to creating a better future. We hope to release at least one podcast a month. I’ve been discussing about launching this with my business partner Kuba for quite some time. We believe that there is
There is a lot of content out there, but it’s either purely technical or very clickbait’ey (a.ka. Tech will steal our jobs and so on..), not really going to any “meat” of the potential and real applications of ML and AI. How can it affect our daily life? At what state if technology right now? What is possible and what’s still a si-fi vision? We want to create a conversation between those two words — technology and business. To bridge them. - Present our tech on at least one of a major conferences in USA. We haven’t really explored US yet. We’ve been mainly working with UK and UAE clients, but I feel USA is ideal since the businesses there are more keen at adopting new solutions.
- Be consistent with writing and sharing my knowledge here on Medium, on LinkedIn and via podcasts we’ll create — I’ve been practicing writing at least one post a week for Untrite. I hope to keep on going. (Tip: Remainders on mobile Google Calendar are a real blessing. No Trello, Asana and even my physical daily to-do lists were able to keep me consistent in writing. Until now.)
Until recently I’ve been quiet on social media because I felt like everything has been said already so why should I add to the noise. But you’re proving me otherwise. You find things I share inspiring and insightful so I’d like to thank you for giving me the reason. And obviously — a very Happy New Year!!! 🥂
Thank you so much for following us on this journey and all the encouragement, it means a lot. You deserve the best 👏
