On a recent  Swiss International flight to the United States, I was remembering the book “The Future Computed,” by Brad Smith and Harry Shum. They tell the story of Melisha Ghimere, 20-year-old computer science student who leverages AI in Nepal to help farmers monitor the health and well-being of their livestock and to prevent outbreaks of diseases. You can find my book recommendation here.

I was fortunate enough to be flying in business class. As I read, the flight attendants moved through the cabin asking passengers to choose their meal from a menu with three or four options per course. They noted down each passenger’s preference on a piece of paper.

“Customers articulate, business value in many ways, but at the end of the day, every description resolves down to just three dimensions: increasing my revenue, lowering my costs, and reducing my risk.”

Did you know that the current B2B model originated in the 1880s? In fact, it’s attributed that John Patterson is the “father of professional selling”, who in 1984 bought a controlling interest of the National Manufacturing Company of Dayton, Ohio. Later he renamed the company to National Cashier Register or in short (NCR). If you already have experience in B2B sales, then most of the things you know about how to sell comes from the framework he introduced and made NCR a huge success.

At the Tech Summit 2018 in Switzerland, I had the unique opportunity to sit down with Mark Russinovich and ask him a few questions, just before his opening keynote presentation.

Melisha Ghimere, a 20-year-old computer science student leverages AI in Nepal to help farmers monitor the health and well being of their livestock and to prevent outbreaks of diseases. Her inspiration came from her own experience when her family pretty much lost all their livestock to anthrax.

December is just great, especially when you get an advents calendar. I mean think about it, one surprise every day building up momentum and excitement for Christmas. Many people still believe that AI is up there and only for the very complicated projects and that you need a lot of money to do anything with it. But they’re wrong. This app only cost me $250, see for yourself in this episode.