Part I – What’s an AI company?

Here at DMS Group we have recently embarked on a series of adventures with AI Agents. This is Part I of a series on that theme. We start with a thought provoking conversation ‘What is an AI Company?’. Later we plan to share the design thinking, tools experiences and code examples that we’ve utilized to help build out AI Agents for clients. Here goes…

Recently, we had one of those fun conversations that provoked some interesting thoughts. There’s been so much “AI washing” of late. Its not surprising that many of us in the tech industry frown when we hear the term now. At DMS we don’t consider ourselves an AI company. We’d position ourselves as a technology consulting company with a focus on system process integration. However a friend and former colleague challenged us on that. True, we do utilize AI to expedite our software development. Yes, true, we do leverage AI as a Research Assistant. Ok, also true is that we use AI to assist marketing efforts and… yes, true, we’ve even began to work on putting AI inside the workflow processes we deliver to clients! OK, so does that make DMS an AI company? You decide, but before you do that, let us ask this question:

“if a business uses software, does that make it a software company?”

…OR…

“If your business uses cloud services, does that make you a cloud company?”

We suspect most would agree with us that it does not. Which brings us back to our original position. AI while nascent in places is quickly becoming ubiquitous. If we are all using it and that defines an AI company then we’re all AI companies and the descriptor is moot.

Finally, it would be remiss of us, if not fun, if we did not to ask at least one AI service for its thoughts on this. We picked Microsoft’s Copilot. It gleefully replied in its first sentence that “An AI company is typically defined as a business that specializes in developing and utilizing artificial intelligence technologies“.  We’d argue it’s the former part of this statement not the latter. What are your thoughts?