Enterprise AI is waiting for its iPhone moment

I still remember where I was when Steve Jobs walked onto the stage at the Moscone Center in January 2007. I was watching the livestream, and somewhere around the first demo I had the distinct feeling that the ground had shifted. Not because the iPhone invented anything—it didn’t—but because it made everything that already existed finally work together. That’s how he managed to spark the smartphone revolution. In 2007, we already had email, web browsing, cameras, MP3 players, and what the industry optimistically called “feature phones.” I’d used several of those so-called smartphones before. Most of them required more patience than intelligence, and handing one to a nontechnical person was practically an act of cruelty. What Apple did was absorb all that complexity and hand you something you could actually use. The multi-touch interface replaced styluses and nested menus. The integration replaced the fragmentation. The iPhone wasn’t important because it added one more function. It was important because it stopped asking the user to care about how any of it worked. Edsger W. Dijkstra once said that “complexity sells better.” But every so often, simplicity wins by such a margin that …