- talk - Main Stage - Real World Stories of AI in Action
What the goblins can teach us about enterprise AI
Wednesday 15th October 2025 • 2:40 PM - 3:10 PMI've learned what agentic AI is by fighting goblins, talking with trolls, and buy custom made boots from gnomes. After a few years of playing solo D&D with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc., playing the role of a DM, I started writing little plugins (Model Context Protocol servers) to give the ChatDM. This is much better than writing agentic AI for insurance claims apps! But, you can learn patterns and ways of using UI that are applicable to the more boring, well, practical applications of AI. D&D is incredibly complex, arguably, more complex than most any "enterprise application." If the robot can play D&D, it can play ERP. The programming part of this isn't important, instead, it's interesting to see what's possible, how AIs work, and imagine what's possible next...by playing games, not doing boring work.
About Michael Cote
Michael Coté studies how large organizations improve how they build software to run and grow their business. His books Changing Mindsets, Monolithic Transformation, and The Business Bottleneck cover these topics. He’s been an industry analyst at RedMonk and 451 Research, done corporate strategy and M&A, and was a programmer. He also co-hosts several podcasts, including Software Defined Talk. His daily-ish newsletter is at newsletter.cote.io.