Richard R. Waterfield Speaks at Columbia Business School Richard R. Waterfield, co-chairman and CEO of Waterfield Enterprises, returned to Columbia University for a panel discussion exploring the relationship between faith, finance and human flourishing. A 1994 Columbia economics graduate, Waterfield drew on his Indiana upbringing and career in finance and business leadership to discuss why…
By Damian Mathews & The Last Mile Team Ask a stranger to name an AI company and you’ll get one answer. ChatGPT. Over a billion people use it every month. It’s a verb now, the Kleenex of artificial intelligence. Which is what makes last week’s news so strange. Anthropic, the AI company many people outside the…
By Kerry Robinson Hi, it’s Kerry here standing in for Damian, who will hopefully return from his travels energized and eager to host The Last Mile next week 😎 Meanwhile I hosted a LinkedIn live this week with my co-conspirators Michael (Fish) Fisher, and Dan Aslet where we revisited the idea of the AI first…
By Kerry Robinson Hi, it’s Kerry here again, standing in for Damian, who’s still road tripping around the US of A 😎 Meanwhile, in the AtCoder World Tour Finals 2025 in Tokyo, Polish superstar Przemysław “Psyho” Dębiak edged out an AI coding agent that OpenAI entered into the competition. He shared on social media platform, X: “Humanity…
By Kerry Robinson Hi, it’s Kerry here, back to host The Last Mile for a few weeks while Damian takes a well-earned break after graduating from college. ChatGPT will be nearly three years old when the next college year starts this fall, so Damian is probably one of the last cohort of students to start…
By Kerry Robinson Talk shapes output. Most people treat prompting like a vending machine: press button, get snack. But LLMs aren’t mechanical. They’re behavioral – they pick up on tone, structure, and phrasing. Kerry Robinson put it well in his recent Substack post on why we often say please and thank you to AI, and why that’s…
By Kerry Robinson What gets measured gets managed. But what if you’re measuring (and managing) the wrong thing? For the last two decades, customer service has been ruled by metrics like average handle time, tickets closed, and first-call resolution. Those numbers showed up in dashboards. Those dashboards shaped behavior. But now those numbers are starting…
By Kerry Robinson I used to think the best customer service was fast, friendly, and easy. Now I’m not so sure. In the past year, I’ve seen a different kind of gold standard quietly emerging. No service at all. Your refund gets issued before you ask. Your order re-routes before you notice a delay. Your…
By Kerry Robinson Welcome to the first edition of ‘The Last Mile’ 😁 This is the follow up to our Teaching Robots to Talk series, because robots learned to talk, now we need to put them to work! That’s a bigger challenge that cuts cost across AI, CX, and IT, but we’ve got you covered:…
By Kerry Robinson It was 2 years into our ‘Gen AI journey’ before me and my long-time collaborator – Dan Aslet – began trying to transform Waterfield Tech with AI. First, we had to figure out what this new kind of AI was capable of. We did a lot of experimenting and prototyping and built a…