Vinnie Mirchandani is a leading technology analyst with a four-decade career at PwC, Gartner, and a firm he founded, Deal Architect. He has advised clients around the world and has worked, lived, and traveled in 75 countries. He has written ten books, countless blogs, and records a video channel on technology-enabled innovation. His most recent book he co-authored is a fiction mystery, The AI Analyst.
As we gradually work into a new year, we hope you’ll find entertainment in this book and conversation.
M.R.: Vinnie, I am not surprised to see a book from you on AI, but in the mystery genre? You have me really curious.
Vinnie Mirchandani: MR, not only my first fiction, but also first with a co-author. Kimberly McDonald Baker was at Oracle and I was at Gartner when we first met over 25 years and discussed an outline of the plot.
Barry Roman, a billionaire CEO of Silicon Valley based company, Polestar disappears. His former executive, Patrick Brennan is now a technology analyst for Oxford Research in St, Peterburg, FL. He has worked with the FBI before and is embedded in the search for Barry. So much has changed in the 25 years since. AI and automation in robotics, drones etc. have matured.
SV now has wealth created by Apple, NVIDIA, Google, Salesforce and so many others. California and Florida have both changed dramatically. All this upheaval provided a nice canvas and many new characters for the book. The suspects in the plot include Barry’s estranged wife, a disgruntled former executive, Chinese intelligence, the Italian Mob, Latin gangs and many others. And plenty of non-human copilots, drones, bots play roles as they are doing in real life.
M.R.: Enterprise tech is not easy to explain to the average reader. They are even less familiar with Industry Analysts. What challenges did you face in simplifying these complex subjects for your audience?
Vinnie: Actually, even folks in enterprise tech are not that familiar with contemporary tech like GPUs, LLMs and digital agents or how analysts create Magic Quadrants and how that world has changed with
boutique firms and bloggers.
But I am a storyteller. I have written countless case studies about corporate strategies, breakout products, and high-tech events in my technology innovation blogs and books. My interviewees are from around the world, speak with heavy accents and use TLAs so rampant in tech. I am used to translating that into much simpler language and that skill definitely helped here.
The early reviews of the book have been very positive. More challenging was this book required an intense focus on human emotion in terrifying, joyful, and humorous situations. For that I thank my wife, Margaret Newman. She always does a readability review of my business books but here her background in psychiatry really came in handy. She is an astute observer of people and she forced us to dwell longer in many scenes and bring out emotional intensity from each character.
M.R.: What will surprise readers the most?
Vinnie: I don’t want to reveal too much of the plot, but there are many twists and turns like any good mystery should have. The book is 300 pages long – many of my readers like that size so they can finish it on an international or cross country flight. Reviewers have told us they could not put the book down.
Another surprise for many readers is how many settings they will recognize. In your part of the world we
have Pebble Beach, Half Moon Bay, Gilroy and several others. Several restaurants and museums in
western Florida where Patrick and his Indian American wife, Maya are based. Talking of India, we have
scenes where we explain rituals in a Hindu wedding. U of Michigan football shows up in several scenes.
So does Western China. The book is fast-paced, but we take the reader around the globe. Another twist
is how many strong female characters we have in the book. That’s where having a lady co-author really
helped. However the most surprising thing readers will find is Polestar is a next-gen tech vendor which combines agentic AI with humanoid robots. Polestar defines its verticals as each of the 800+ occupations the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks, Their solutions automate limbs, eyesight and other human faculties, not just cognitive skills. Similarly, Oxford Research is a next-gen analyst firm. They have labs which test products and their security vulnerabilities, they create copilots. Their focus is not just IT, but energy and other STEM disciplines and they have a global reach. The book also has a next-gen technology buyer in the NYC financial institution, Sheldon Freres which knows how to monetize its mountains of unique data in our age of AI.
So, while I hope readers enjoy the suspense and humor in the book, I think it will also inspire them to
evolve their own jobs and broadly their employers.
M.R. Rangaswami is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com