Ray S. MacDonald | Executive Advisor

AI Bubble = Not! the Next Equilibrium = Re-valuation

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 10:16:51 -0700

AI Bubble = Not!

The Next Equilibrium = Re-valuation

AI Bubble = Unlikely, yet the Next Equilibrium will True Up Future Valuations after exuberance!

I see headlines frustrating to me everywhere asking: “Is AI a bubble?” or even some others stating, “The AI Bubble!” as if it exists to warn about. This most often leads to a commentary making references to the dot.com bubble burst, which began in March in the year 2000. Today’s AI Bubble phrases dominate financial media, echoing fears of dot.com style collapse playing out as a "bubble burst". But my view based on my depth of experience is different: the AI story is not about fragility or impending burst, should there be a reaction to disillusionment it should trigger a recalibration - not a burst.

Unlike the dot.com era, where investment dollars flowed primarily into unproven new ventures with no profits and only future hopes, today’s AI-enhanced valuations are being applied heavily to established megacap businesses with solid profitability. AI is being integrated into existing business models, improving efficiency and opening new revenue streams, not funding speculative ideas that may or may not survive. Therefore, if investor expectations run ahead of the actual pace of change, any later downward adjustments would be a managed reevaluation and not a burst. Sure, some investments are made in small startup enthusiasts that may or may not succeed, and there could be a small bubble burst at this level, but as to the overall market there should not be a significant impact; explanations below…

1. The Bubble Illusion

The Future Workplace: Identifying a trifecta of vital transformations for the journey.

Ray MacDonald -Technology Consultant, May 7, 2021

There are many publications, postings, and consulting firm recommendations about the future of work and how the workplace must at a minimum adopt to it, yet the workplace could be a driver of the transformation. The workplace as a driver can be done when there is a clear well communicated vision of what the culture of the transforming business is to be (if we don’t know the end-state, we surely must at least know the next milestone).

Let me try to summarize some of the current thinking into a trifecta of “from – to” journeys for broad-based success:

from Control to Trust
from Self-Service to Self-Sufficient
from Divisions to Shared Purpose

from Control to TRUST

Work with HR to define flexible work policies. Just as many businesses and social organizations have embraced the strategies for “Digital First”, perhaps the workplace should embrace “Work from Anywhere First”. This is to say that where it can be embraced, “work from home/anywhere” should be expected and it should not be some sort of reward, special treatment, nor “the exception”.

Executive leaders from the least experienced to the lavishly experienced must embrace a transformed workplace that will attract the best people. The hybrid approach is the most likely future (some in-office, some anywhere, and at flexible times), and any reticence to embrace this does not seem to be an age thing. Executives of all categories have personal preferences of teamwork and leadership style. Managing by Objectives requires trust and trust is built from results; yet if an executive does not allow the workforce to demonstrate results in new...Read More

Innovation while under Economic Shutdown

Wed, 29 Apr 2020 22:45:12 -0700

Is the Price worth it? Some people wonder if the sudden shutdown of the economy is worth it to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve seen some celebrity business news folks openly wonder if it was worth the shutdown to “save the older generations”? I have a personal experience: in my family the COVID-19 tragedy took hold early, my wife’s sister died on Easter Friday and their mother, who she looked after, died on Easter Monday. I hope all the folks who wonder, “if it’s all worth it?”, won’t experience the grief, the hurtful tear in the family, that we have. I hope the distancing requirements and careful disinfecting and other precautions will shorten the impact this virus is having; I hope the great majority will listen and continue to behave in a safer way.

In the middle of all this tragic mess, there are amazing Canadian innovators springing up and about to shine brightly. I thought a brief blog to highlight 6 innovative considerations might be of great interest:

1) AI early warnings – BlueDot

2) Testing, mobile – Spartan BioScience

3) Sanitising (re-use) – Clean Works

4) Vaccine (plant based, highly adaptable) – Medicago

5) Tracking for contact tracing and avoidance – misc.

6) National Day of Prayer – Canada was a leader

1) BlueDot. This innovative Artificial Intelligence start-up with machine learning, out of the University of Toronto pushed out a notification to its key stakeholders back on New Year’s Eve warning that a mysterious illness appeared in Wuhan, China. (please see my previous blogs on the Toronto tech start-up scene, or on Read More

Leading People Remotely

Mon, 09 Mar 2020 14:00:03 -0700

Ray MacDonald, www.raymacdonald.com, March 9th, 2020

Leading People Remotely: 5 key focus areas for sustainable team performance

Leading people working remotely: 5 key focus areas for sustainable team success

Many organizations are now required to minimize personal contact to avoid spreading virus infection, including office environments that are mandating workers to “work from home”.

Technology solutions are being heavily promoted that are designed to enable workers (teams) to “work from anywhere”, to collaborate, and to host distributed meetings.

Let's talk about leading teams to a performance level when all the members are remote.

Remote leadership best practices in large enterprises were developing and becoming more pervasive during the 90s through the 2000s before a back to the office call was made in 2013.

Getting and keeping a team of remote workers to sustain a high level of performance requires use of all the good leadership skills we have known plus specifically focusing on some nuances to generate more frequent feedback; leaders must adopt creative high-touch strategies. Too often for remote teams leaders feel at ease frequently cancelling meetings, adjusting schedules, and doing other culture-killing behaviours because no one is staring them in the face. Should a team culture be falling apart, by the time it is noticed, it is often difficult to adjust/recover.

The famous Tuckman teamwork model (Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing – (and the added Reforming)) focuses leaders on using techniques (tools from their kit of learnings) to shorten time spent in those unproductive early stages of Forming and Storming, and to mentor teams and make them sustainable at the more productive Norming and ideally reach the Performing stages. If you need a refresh on the Tuckman "Fight Right" model, Edward Muzio has a great 3 minute YouTube video to watch...

On-premises teams often use social tools...Read More

Look Up! Satellites changing the world again

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 12:15:48 -0800

Look up! Satellites in low orbits to provide equal hi-speed communications to the world.

Satellite technology innovation first seemed to suddenly change the world 46 years ago, and all things point to the next big change happening again later this year thanks to investments by Elon Musk through SpaceX and Starlink.

Fans of Elvis Presley can’t forget that he was the first artist to video broadcast on satellite back in January 1973 (see “Elvis: Aloha from Hawaii Via Satellite”, if you have the DVD set, be sure to watch the “rehearsal concert” instead of the final concert, amazing energy and music). It was a wonderous time back then when the United States and Russia had just gone through a space race resulting in manned trips to the moon, and suddenly concerts and other events were being broadcasting live around the world.

Satellites, those in GEO synchronous orbit (a bit about that later) are great for broadcasting, but not so good for today’s interactive Internet communications; and it’s not so much a technology problem but a distance problem; the speed of light limitation combined with distance exposes a weakness in how the Internet communicates in small packets.

Elon Musk is executing a plan that will again change the world almost overnight using satellites! In fact, he has over 300 of these VLEO (very low earth orbit) satellites whizzing over our heads with a total of 1,584 planned and says he is seeking permission to have up to 42,000. Read More

AI and your people

Wed, 23 Oct 2019 09:18:36 -0700

Artificial Intelligence (and its sub-components of Machine Learning and Deep Learning) are becoming pervasive, let's discuss getting ready for the impact on business operations with a focus on people.

If Artificial Intelligence is the practice of using technology to complete tasks while that very same technology mimics human intelligence (by being able to self-direct, to achieve/accumulate knowledge and perform decision making; i.e. to be autonomous by continually improving itself without human intervention) – then many people are and will be asking: "aren’t humans going to be replaced in the workforce and isn’t that scary and potentially Armageddon-like?" (you know, like Cyberdyne Systems, Skynet and all that artificial intelligence based Hollywood movie Terminator sci-fi stuff?)

I had time, while flying back from Ireland, to contribute to the wider AI discussion on its expected impact to business culture and even its effect at the individual level. Perhaps you've noticed that many people, including in the popular media, are discussing what they think the impact of increased use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will do? Even more interesting is what AI's sub capabilities of Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL), will do? In early October my wife and I celebrated our first 30 years of marriage by spending time in Ireland (yes, we thought it would be special to land 6 hours ahead of Hurricane Lorenzo and then drive for 3 hours directly at it to get to the west coast in Donegal. We really believed in heading for "The Wild Atlantic Way" https://www.wildatlanticway.com/home

There we found frequent conversations in cafés and with relatives and...Read More

Do You Know Where Your Data Is?

Thu, 19 Sep 2019 21:18:08 -0700

Reminder: Own Your Data and Your Backup Plan

September 20th, 2019 | by Ray MacDonald

Many new and/or modified IT strategies are required in the new Digital Business paradigm. Some new services allow for rapid execution of new solutions. For businesses to run quickly (more quickly!) they must embrace the trifecta of new computing requirements of speed, security/privacy, quality; but they must still protect themselves through the solid disciplines of business continuity, ownership rights, and data architecture standards.

What often gets overlooked in the rush to the Cloud is to ensure that you “Own Your Data”. A hard lesson was learned by some businesses, within this decade, about suddenly losing access to their business information data.

Your business must have access in multiple ways, to multiple copies of your data. How this is done and to what extent of business continuity planning (BCP/BCM) will be custom to each situation. It may be simple enough to have your data in multiple Cloud vendors (even just 2 if that works), or you may want to maintain access to a smaller data centre-like facility with storage services combined with a data architecture mapping for all your data, or you may use a storage managed service or even a Cloud integrator. There are many ways to accomplish the need, but it is a very important need, and you must own, guard, and champion your data and protect your ownership of it and have easy access to it.

The need for vendor diversity is stronger than ever. One of your most valuable assets is your business information data. When a large amount of Your Data is in a Cloud provider, should a need transpire to suddenly move it, just how will you get that done if you don’t have another copy in another place?

Too often the simplicity of starting to use a Cloud SaaS (Software as a Service), by simply quickly signing up (give account info) and use a credit card to pay for it, risks protection of...Read More

Toronto and Canada start-ups (part 2)

Thu, 12 Sep 2019 21:14:12 -0700

September 13^th, 2019 | by Ray MacDonald

Transformational capabilities driven by new technologies and methods require us in the IT profession to help companies get to new places which have not yet been possible but we must now emphasize speed of execution along with innovation.

A brief comment on this week’s Oracle news. Health comes first and I wish Mark Hurd the best in dealing with his personal situation. Oracle released its results a couple days early this week in order to also announce Mark’s situation. At Oracle Open World next week there will be a lot of talk about the Autonomous Database which is finally becoming a practical reality (it was announced in 2017, some bits of use in 2018, but finally getting some real trials this year).

Seminar September 19^th– of particular interest to myself, and thought I’d share it, is a free live online (virtual) seminar on leadership, networking, resume, salary negotiation coming up September 19th from the leadership at VMware. I copied the announcement below...

>>> Please join Pat Gelsinger as he presents The 5 L's of Leadership. As VMware CEO, Pat will share his perspective on what it takes to navigate and lead the digital future in an era of unpredictable, disruptive...Read More

9/11 18 years after...

Wed, 11 Sep 2019 07:53:52 -0700

9/11 Impact

by Ray MacDonald, September 11, 2019

Experiencing the reality of horrendous loss at the same time as going through a determined personal and global teamwork effort to overcome it -- shaped my leadership and teamwork for life.

As I write this on September 11, 2019 I sadly remember what we went through at Marsh McLennan Companies. MMC, specifically Marsh Inc., lost 295 employees, I knew about 27 of them well including Marsh's Canadian CIO who was there that day. I will never forget Bernard ( http://memorial.mmc.com/M/bernard-mascarenhas.html ) and the others.

http://memorial.mmc.com

Some months before it happened, I was starting to frequently visit our global headquarters IT group on the 96th and higher floors of World Trade Center 1 in NYC. The global data centre was on the 100th floor. I was working for Mercer HR, before later moving to Marsh Inc. We were just beginning to use my "Oracle Save $1B" experience in global IT consolidation to work with Marsh, Putnam, and others making up the 11 operating companies of MMC for consolidating IT operations and vendor management. I was often amused how obvious the new folks stood out in the WTC meeting rooms; in a large meeting room almost everyone would be heads down working on consolidation strategies, while the new folks (certainly included me initially) were turned around, at the windows, amazed at the view looking directly out over the Statue of Liberty from the 96th floor. I recently found my last visitors access badge with my photo to the World Trade Center building - that's certainly something I'll hang onto.

On 9/11, I was in our Toronto offices, a week after my most recent visit to WTC1, when everyone started to try and find a screen to watch the news as the 9/11 horrors were taking place. A few of us initially headed...Read More

Toronto Tech

Fri, 06 Sep 2019 08:28:53 -0700

What's going on in Toronto tech?

An exciting time for Toronto in the press this year, yes NBA championship city, and of course the annual TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival going on right now!), but this blog post is about the popularity of Toronto Canada as a tech centre (Silicon Valley North?).

There’s lots of coverage both locally (articles in July from Toronto Star, and Global and Mail) and also international.

The organizers of the Collision conference, which now makes Toronto home (plan to attend in June 2020), made some great remarks on their blog hosted on Medium.com earlier this year…

“The start-up scene in Toronto is booming. Since 2013, VC funding and investment in start-ups has increased by over 150%, with over 4,100 tech start-ups currently active in the Greater Toronto Area. Across Canada, 2018 was a record year for investment, with VC funding reaching an all-time high at US$2.7 billion.

Canada is home to Shopify, HootSuite, Wattpad, Kik, 500px, Element AI and Cloudflare, to name a small few of the unicorns and massive start-up” successes that have come from the Great White North.” https://medium.com/@WebSummitHQ/is-toronto-the-new-silicon-valley-3b8047ce32e3

The CBRE’s 2018 North American Scoring Tech Talent report they referred to tells how Toronto added 82,100 hi-tech jobs between 2012 and 2017, highest among North American cities, growing the talent pool by...Read More