Houdini, An AI Elephant and 2025 Good News/Bad News

Also Why Every Board Needs to Pay Attention to GOF-AI

Houdini could not make an elephant disappear. He could make an entire theater look stage left as the elephant sauntered off stage right. In the minds of the audience, in the room, he really did make the elephant disappear.

As businesses focus on GenAI, agentic AI, and all the wonderful things that can be learned/built on their LLMs 'factory' a herd of elephants will be ignored to one extent or another.

Two of those will be GOF-AI and Supply Chain. GOF-AI is something I just made up but happens also to be real: Good Old Fashioned AI.

The good news for 2025, on the back of geopolitics, socioeconomics, and tectonic tech shifts, is that it will create opportunities to thwart the competition, leap ahead, and profit, unlike any year in a decade or more. Of course, you want to be on the winning side of that.

The bad news is that 2025 may have more supply chain challenges than any other decade due to geopolitics, geo-socioeconomics, policy change, nation-state economic conflict, weather/climate events, and increased demand volatility worldwide.

In those sorts of times, intelligence will matter, specifically the predictive, proactive, preventative, pattern-matched, precise, process performance, and peer-interconnected kind. Sure, GenAI/Agentic matter in 2025, but most of that rests on GOF-AI. It rests on near real-time signals about change, politics, weather, and policy all the way to your tier-three suppliers in Malaysia, Matamoros, or Mumbai.

Everstream Analytics is a firm that has been working on just that for the enterprise for years. It combines GOF-AI with human intel and experts on the ground around the globe.

David Shillingford has an excellent sub-10-minute talk on that below.

Beyond a more intelligent and agile supply chain, the next big thing will be an operation-level intelligence platform architected to ingest any and all data rapidly and analyze it in real-time (as opposed to storing and then analyzing). This platform will include GenAI capability and not only feed you intelligence but also give you an easy construction platform to change processes, build programs, and alter outcomes.

This is the next-generation operating system for your healthcare operation, smart city/campus, defense platform, energy plant, logistics hub, etc. That is VANTIQ. It is my favorite example of huge complexity architected inside so the adopter/user experience is fast, easy, and productive. It is years of world-class engineering on top of brilliant architecture. It will already orchestrate GenAI, which is the real key to Agentic AI. It also embraces GOF-AI.