A Baconian approach to the mostly Aristotelian corporate AI. And what that means for your business

I have been writing for several months about what I see more and more as the central problem in enterprise AI. I’m seeing it not just from an academic perspective: Of course, I’m a university professor with more than 30 years of experience, but I’m also the director of innovation of an artificial intelligence startup, and that’s teaching me a whole lot of new skills. Traveling from theory to code and back, day in and day out, is proving to be an amazingly enriching journey. First of all, we should know by now that large language models are extraordinarily capable, but they were not designed to run companies. They are great at generating answers. But organizations require other things: persistent state, formal structures, permissions, feedback loops, measurable objectives, and the ability to learn from outcomes. The more these ideas travel from essays and diagrams into working software, the clearer the problem appears. The concepts that sound convincing in prose tend to collapse when someone has to express them in code. “Memory” turns out not to be a data model. “Autonomy” means little without permissions. “Learning” is not the same thing as simply accumulating context. And “optimization,” as we all know, becomes dangerous unless somebody defines exactly what the system is being asked to optimize. This is not simply a technical problem. It is an epistemological one: The AI industry has built Aristotelian machines. What enterprises need now is a Baconian approach. The most powerful Aristotelian machines ever created For more than 2,000 years, Western thought has been shaped by Aristotle’s extraordinary influence on logic and deduction. Start with premises, reason correctly from them, and jump to a conclusion. The syllogism we study in Philosophy 101 is the classic example: All humans are mortal; Socrates is human; therefore, Socrates is mortal. If the premises are correct and the reasoning is valid, the conclusion follows.