Once upon a time, yes, really, there was a world without mobile phones

When mobiles finally arrived, sales teams were handed Nokias

Solid, reliable bricks that let you do one thing: call people

That was the golden era of enterprise mobility

Then the internet came along. Dismissed by many as a passing fad

Fast forward to September 2001: the BlackBerry dropped

Suddenly, we could email on the move

And then, on 9th January 2007, Apple rewrote the rules with the iPhone

The world shifted again

But the enterprise didn’t keep up. While companies dished out basic handsets, salespeople craved something cooler; BlackBerrys, then iPhones

So we bought our own

Welcome to BYOD (Bring Your Own Device)

And with that, control shifted away from IT departments to the people actually doing the work

When the enterprise blocked Facebook? We just opened it on our personal phones. Easy

And now, look around. It's happening again

AI is this generation’s iPhone moment

Last week marked the 8th anniversary of the now-famous research paper “Attention Is All You Need”, the foundation of the large language models behind ChatGPT

Today, ChatGPT boasts 500 million users

Google’s Gemini? 400 million

And just like BYOD, we’re now in a world of BYOAI—Bring Your Own AI

While AWS, Oracle, and Salesforce are rolling out “enterprise-grade” AI tools, employees are already bringing their own, using ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and more; on their terms, at their speed

Having written this blog, I plugged it into ChatGPT and asked it to write a conclusion and make a prediction of the future and here it is ….

Conclusion:

Just like with smartphones, the genie is out of the bottle

AI isn’t waiting for enterprise approval. It’s already in the hands of the people

Prediction:

Expect a power shift, again

Enterprises that embrace consumer-led AI adoption will move faster and gain more ground than those still trying to control it from the top down

Because just like the iPhone, this wave won’t be stopped

I need to say that the idea and concept for this blog was riffed out by Bertrand Godillot and myself and I must name him as inspiration and idea generator and without whom, this blog wouldn't exist 

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