ai – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

Agentic Artificial Intelligence: Harnessing AI Agents to Reinvent Business, Work & Life

By Scott J. Pearson | September 7, 2026September 7, 2026 by Scott J. Pearson

Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to evolve quickly, perhaps too quickly for all of us to keep up. One of the current innovations is agentic AI, which can accomplish specific tasks for you with minimal programming or coding. Pascal Bornet and his vast team shows us how these innovations can help our lives and our work. Why did I pick up this book? I kept hearing the words “agentic AI” without really having a strong grasp…

A Giant Leap: How AI is Transforming Healthcare & What That Means for Our Future

By Scott J. Pearson | June 29, 2026June 29, 2026 by Scott J. Pearson

There is no doubt that generative AI is a disruptive technology that will continue to have impacts in the coming years if not decades. Representing one-fifth of the American economy, healthcare is one area where AI has perhaps the most promise to do good. Since much of healthcare runs on textual material, generative AI’s ability to process material and respond appropriately brings a huge “wow” factor. UCSF clinician and informaticist Robert Wachter brings those ideas…

Artificial Intelligence Leadership

Leaderwired: The AI-Era Leadership Playbook for Transforming How You Think, Decide & Lead

By Scott J. Pearson | March 22, 2026March 22, 2026 by Scott J. Pearson

Change is the key challenge to any leader because there’s no great way to predict its course. New things arise, and no clear direction exists. All we can do is to prepare ourselves and our mindsets to embrace new challenges with a realistic yet positive attitude. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a key case in point. As a paradigm-shifting technology, it is changing the way workplaces operate, and those who don’t adapt well – or don’t…

Artificial Intelligence

Practical Generative AI with ChatGPT: Unleash Your Prompt Engineering Potential with OpenAI Technologies for Productivity and Creativity

By Scott J. Pearson | February 5, 2026February 5, 2026 by Scott J. Pearson

Most of us are impressed with how well Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently advanced, but we’re still struggling to use it to improve our personal productivity. We’ve heard of the promises but fear the shortcomings, too. Books like Valentina Alto’s Practical Generative AI with ChatGPT can point the way to us capitalizing on the promise in our personal work. Alto briefly covers the topic of Prompt Engineering that’s key to making the most out of…

Artificial Intelligence Software-Technology

Designing Machine Learning Systems: An Iterative Process for Production-Ready Applications

By Scott J. Pearson | January 14, 2026January 14, 2026 by Scott J. Pearson

Machine learning (ML) is a hot yet daunting topic. It’s perhaps the most important technological advancement supporting the revolution in artificial intelligence (AI), and most leading IT companies have been extracting value from it for some time. Almost every time predictions are made by a computer, like when a product or really anything is recommended, ML is at work. This book explains in technical detail how to get ML projects out of theory and into…

Artificial Intelligence

A Simple Guide to Retrieval Augmented Generation

By Scott J. Pearson | December 18, 2025December 18, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a process in artificial intelligence (AI) where specific documents can be consulted to provide an answer. It provides a way for individual groups to customize a bot for their internal uses. For example, a company can provide business policies specific to their own organization. Or healthcare firms can provide literature up to date with their own fields, not just the latest AI build of the foundation model. Frankly, this topic confused…

Artificial Intelligence Indie

The Complete Guide to Microsoft Agent Framework: Build, Test & Manage AI Agents that Integrate Seamlessly with Azure, M365 & Business APIs

By Scott J. Pearson | December 17, 2025December 17, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

This book seeks to teach readers how to write Python or .NET code to perform certain tasks as Agents within Microsoft’s AI platform. Unfortunately, it’s heavy on code and light on concepts. I wish it’d teach more about how to integrate with Azure’s web interface instead of the command line alone. It does succeed at showing many examples of how to code agents, but it lacks a deep conceptual explanation of how agents integrate with…

Artificial Intelligence Indie

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) & Vector Databases: A Practical Guide for AI Developers

By Scott J. Pearson | December 17, 2025December 17, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is how artificial intelligence prioritizes facts in a given domain over and above all the information the basic, foundational model offers. It allows businesses, scientists, and others to prioritize their custom knowledge instead of making up answers. It’s an extremely powerful tool that most AI users don’t understand. This book tries to explain the basics of a RAG system in Python code. Unfortunately, despite a grasp on the basics of RAG, it…

Artificial Intelligence

Prompt Engineering for Generative AI: Future-Proof Inputs for Reliable AI Outputs

By Scott J. Pearson | December 13, 2025December 13, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Prompt engineering is the art and science of finding the right words to generate the right responses from artificial intelligence (AI). It’s becoming a skill in-demand in today’s workplaces. It’s also becoming an essential skill for life. To understand prompt engineering, you must understand how AI tools understand their inputs. This book explains that to you in many forms. It covers prompting as it intersects all the major AI disciplines, like general prompts (as in…

Artificial Intelligence Software-Technology

Developing Apps with GPT-4 and ChatGPT: Build Intelligent Chatbots, Content Generators & More

By Scott J. Pearson | December 3, 2025December 3, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Everyone today seems to want to do something with artificial intelligence (AI), but few seem to know how to do it well. We’ve started to see how AI bots can induce horrors, and business leaders plead to avoid those risks. ChatGPT, packaged from OpenAI, remains the dominant, most trusted AI tool even though many other versions exist. It’d be nice if we software folks could stop and get a masters degree in AI, but life…