Welcome to Edition 9 of The CAIO.
From October every AI request at Zühlke is billed to the team that made it. Token prices more than halved this summer, and the bill is still the number to watch. A cheap model that fails twice and ends with a person on the case costs more than the expensive one. The same agent on the same prompt takes two routes and sends two bills. My own dark factory burned one billion tokens over several days for a game I would not pay for. Almost no company has a person whose job is to watch that bill and switch.
A year ago I called DevSecOps, continuous delivery, cloud and AIOps as the trends for 2021. Most of those landed. For 2022 the picture gets more interesting because DevOps is no longer a single wave — different parts of the market are at very different stages of adoption. To make sense of that, I map the 2022 trends onto the technology adoption lifecycle: late majority, early majority and early adopters.
The second way to introduce DevOps is to build a strong flow of feedback going in the opposite direction of the value flow — from customers and production back into the business and into development. This is the Second Way in Gene Kim’s Three Ways framework, and it is what stops the First Way from optimising in the dark.
