Frame Before You Aim: Why AI Needs the Right Reference Point
Business AI has acquired a slightly dangerous reflex: when a system underperforms, reach for a stronger model, a faster pipeline, or a more elaborate scoring function. Very enterprise. Very expensive. Occasionally useful. The more interesting failure mode is quieter. A system may have enough intelligence, enough data, and enough compute, yet still be solving the wrong version of the problem because it inherited the wrong reference frame. It reads a wearable signal as if it were clinical instrumentation. It schedules network traffic as if packets only matter after they announce themselves. It ranks alternatives as if the best and worst items in the current dataset were the same thing as business aspiration and business refusal. ...