Alberto Viotto
My background is technical. I started out as a systems analyst and software developer, a trade that obliges you to understand the anatomy of an organization before writing a single line of code, and that leaves behind a healthy distrust of solutions that arrive before the problem has been understood.
I later moved to the commercial side and to marketing, in multinational groups and in small and medium-sized companies, where I was entrusted with training and leading sales networks. Those years showed me how little my technical preparation accounted for what I saw happening every day. So I turned to the study of social psychology: Lewin, Festinger, Kahneman, and the other authors these pages keep returning to.
The two paths have long since converged again. My work is to conceive software and to bring it to market.
In recent years a substantial part of that work has turned to artificial intelligence, which I study and use in building systems for companies and professional firms. Daily familiarity breeds caution: I have seen its remarkable results and its most glaring blunders, often within the same day. I therefore write about it trying to stay equally distant from enthusiasm and from alarm, attentive above all to what is changing in the way we work, decide, and organize ourselves.
Why this blog
I write because experience, left to habit, tends to ratify what we already believe. Reading the research, and attempting to give an account of it, is the way I have found to put it to the test.