Taler

Anton Smith is an AI Solutions Executive leading AI for the Nordics at Dell. With 25 years of building and shipping products—spanning AI and cloud‑native startups—he brings a glass‑half‑full optimism grounded in delivery. A patent holder in cloud‑native technologies and a longtime product and innovation leader, Anton is an evangelist for pragmatic AI who’s been using AI long before the LLM era. He helps organizations prioritize the right use cases, iterate fast, and turn experiments into outcomes—keeping AI punchy, useful, and firmly tied to business value.

The Beautiful Losers: What the Past Can Teach Us About Winning in the Age of AI

The future of AI will not be determined by who has the most data or compute power — but by who learns the fastest. History’s “beautiful losers” — from companies that rebuilt after collapse to scientists who turned wrong turns into revolutions — remind us that real progress comes from persistence, not perfection. They learned through iteration, humility, and feedback. They didn’t just recover from failure; they used it to build the muscles that make innovation possible.

Now, in the age of AI, that same mindset is no longer optional — it’s the operating system for survival. AI is rewriting the rules of work, creativity, and competition. The cultures that will thrive are those that embrace this moment as a return to apprenticeship — learning how to work with, through, and alongside AI. Those who treat every failed experiment as training data, and every model as a co-learner, will move faster than those still waiting for certainty. The lesson of the beautiful losers is simple: if you want to win in the AI era, you must first remember how to lose — and learn — like them.