The New Frntir… AI business expertise based in Hexham
A year ago Aidan Dunphy cofounded Frntir, an AI business right here in Hexham. He and his partner initially thought they would best serve the market as consultants, until they realised that every third person is apparently now an AI expert. So they decided to prove it by actually building something, and selling that instead.
You may have heard that AI was once defined as “a poor choice of words in 1957” – meaning: it’s not really intelligent. The current crop of AIs can be characterised as “autocomplete on steroids”; they generate text by guessing which word probably follows the last, and images by guessing which pixels are most likely in any given position.
OK that’s a huge simplification, but one shouldn’t imagine that there’s anything creative happening in an AI. Recent scares about humans being replaced wholesale by AI are now looking tenuous; for example, demand for software engineers is increasing again despite the job supposedly being extinct just a few weeks ago.
What I think will be permanently disrupted is the market for traditional business software, especially classic IT tools like CRMs. I’ve been selling these for decades, but admittedly with only partial success. There’s a critical flaw in the design of any software with a ‘user interface’… sometimes referred to as “PEBCAK” (Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard).
Well I never use the term ‘user error’ because in my experience the real reason humans often behave in ways not expected by the designers of the software they’re using is… because they’re human. Who was the idiot that first thought that sales people would spend the last hour of each day gleefully updating a CRM system, fully and accurately? Has anyone ever known this to happen, other than in the supplier’s promo video?
What AI is undeniably extremely good at right now is extracting meaning from messy data: documents, emails, speech. Consider these familiar business conundrums: What’s going on in the business? Should we bid for this? How to respond to this customer opportunity? These are now solved problems: we use AI to find signals amongst noise, extract knowledge from heads and find hitherto unknown relationships. And none of it requires people to fill out forms on screens.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a December 2024 podcast that “SaaS (Software As A Service) will collapse”. It looks like that’s happening faster than many people thought!
Aidan Dunphy.
Cofounder, Frntir Ltd (https://frntir.ai) based in Hexham.
Aiden is also the founder of Samespace Coworking