Bill Huber

Digital & Cost Optimization Partner at ISG - All opinions expressed are solely my own.

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

Why don’t we have monuments to this man?

[Tech with Mak @techNmak]

In 1948, a 32-year-old at Bell Labs published a paper nobody fully understood.

Engineers found it too mathematical. Mathematicians found it too engineering-focused. One prominent mathematician reviewed it negatively.

That paper - "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", became the founding document of the digital age.

The man was Claude Shannon. Father of Information Theory.

At 21, he wrote the most important master's thesis of the 20th century.

Working at MIT on an early mechanical computer, Shannon noticed its relay switches had exactly two states - open or closed. He had just taken a philosophy course introducing Boolean algebra, which also operated on two values: true and false.

Nobody had ever connected these two things.

His 1937 thesis proved that Boolean algebra and electrical circuits are mathematically identical, and that any logical operation could be built from simple switches.

Howard Gardner called it "possibly the most important, and also the most famous, master's thesis of the century."

Every digital computer ever built traces back to this insight.

At 29, he proved that perfect encryption exists.

During WWII, Shannon worked on classified cryptography at Bell Labs. His work contributed to SIGSALY, the secure voice system used for confidential communications between Roosevelt and Churchill.

In a classified 1945 memorandum, he mathematically proved the one-time pad provides perfect secrecy, unbreakable not just computationally, but provably, permanently, against an adversary with infinite power.

When declassified in 1949, it transformed cryptography from an art into a science. It laid the foundations for DES, AES, and every modern encryption standard.

At 32, he defined what information is.

His 1948 paper introduced one equation:
H = −Σ p(x) log p(x)

Shannon entropy. The average uncertainty in a probability distribution. The minimum bits required to encode a message.

Three things followed:

> He defined the bit - the fundamental unit of all information. His colleague John Tukey coined the name.

> He proved the channel capacity theorem, every communication channel has a maximum rate of reliable transmission. You can approach it. You can never exceed it.

> He unified telegraph, telephone, and radio into a single mathematical framework for the first time.

Robert Lucky of Bell Labs called it the greatest work "in the annals of technological thought."

Where his equation lives in AI today:

Cross-entropy loss - the function training every classifier and language model, is derived directly from H. Decision tree splits use information gain, which is H applied to data. Perplexity, the standard LLM evaluation metric, is an exponentiation of cross-entropy.

Every time a neural network trains, Shannon's formula runs inside it.

He also built the first AI learning device.

In 1950, Shannon built Theseus, a mechanical mouse that navigated a maze through trial and error, learned the correct path, and repeated it perfectly. Mazin Gilbert of Bell Labs said: "Theseus inspired the whole field of AI."

That same year he published the first paper on programming a computer to play chess. He co-organized the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop, the founding event of AI as a field.

The man:
He rode a unicycle through Bell Labs hallways while juggling. He built a flame-throwing trumpet, a rocket-powered Frisbee, and Styrofoam shoes to walk on the lake behind his house.

He called his home Entropy House.

When asked what motivated him: "I was motivated by curiosity. Never by the desire for financial gain. I just wondered how things were put together."

In 1985, he appeared unexpectedly at a conference in Brighton. The crowd mobbed him for autographs. Persuaded to speak at the banquet, he talked briefly, then pulled three balls from his pockets and juggled instead.

One engineer said: "It was as if Newton had showed up at a physics conference."

He died in 2001 after a decade with Alzheimer's, the cruel irony of information slowly leaving the mind of the man who defined what information was.

Claude, the AI model, is named after Claude Shannon, the mathematician who laid the foundation for the digital world we rely on today.

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

Intelligence creates value when earlier knowledge allows an enterprise to change an inventory, maintenance, capacity, service or working-capital decision while there is still time for that decision to matter.
How AI Is Changing the Balance Between Cost, Resilience, Working Capital and Growth
https://t.co/3hWo5xY1Lo via @LinkedIn

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

The New Economics of Supply Chain
How AI Is Changing the Balance Between Cost, Resilience, Working Capital and Growth @JeffOrrISG
https://t.co/mOrpwb3RNp via @LinkedIn

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

In this concluding installment of The Intelligent Commercial Enterprise, through a Procurement lens, I consider why leadership must move beyond optimizing individual functions and instead preserve coherence across the economic system they collectively create. https://t.co/WRPLWtoANN via @LinkedIn

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

Procurement's relationship with the executive team must change for the function to become valuable earlier in strategic discussions. Almost every strategic decision now possesses commercial consequences extending well beyond the function that initiates it. Technology investments reshape supplier markets. https://t.co/mr48J98mXz via @LinkedIn

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

As AI dissolves the boundaries between technology, operations, workforce, and markets, economic objectivity may become Procurement’s most valuable contribution to executive leadership.
https://t.co/1J9IYVBCrb via @LinkedIn

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

Category management is often misaligned with the structure of enterprise capability. Categories themselves are not fixed but are commercial abstractions that describe markets at a particular moment in time, while markets continually redefine themselves.
https://t.co/0zyOJfYbZW

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

Check out my latest article: The Intelligent Commercial Enterprise Why Artificial Intelligence Is Redesigning Enterprise Economics—and Why Procurement Matters More Than Ever Pt.4
https://t.co/0zyOJfYbZW via @LinkedIn

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

Check out my latest article: The Intelligent Commercial Enterprise
Why Artificial Intelligence Is Redesigning Enterprise Economics—and Why Procurement Matters More Than Ever (Pt3
https://t.co/HcBSoNqzyJ via @LinkedIn

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

Check out my latest article: The Intelligent Commercial Enterprise
Why Artificial Intelligence Is Redesigning Enterprise Economics—and Why Procurement Matters More Than Ever Pt.1
https://t.co/c6eZzGT1kO via @LinkedIn

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

Check out my latest article: The Intelligent Commercial Enterprise https://t.co/Xmign6LNqJ via @LinkedIn

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

Huang's notion that open AI access will be safer is an interesting one. In theory, it decentralizes self-defense against AI threats...

[Jensen Huang @JensenHuang]

For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.

AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.

Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.

The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.

https://t.co/AUKzoQ5Ikb

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

@530drgonzo530 @business Tobacky Country? You mean like Connecticut? We’re coal country around Virginia Tech!

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

Governance includes data governance, process governance, and supplier governance…

[Eric Kimberling @erickimberling]

New ERP or SCM systems won't clean your data. They're only as good as what you put in. Before going live, ensure data is clean and users are trained on data management processes. Strong governance prevents the same old problems with new tech. #DataManagement #ERP #SCM

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

Agility and avoiding lock in are valuable features…

[Ronald van Loon @Ronald_vanLoon]

How Microservices Enhance #Business Agility
by @antgrasso

#EmergingTech #Innovation #Technology

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

Flooding the ecosystem with more synthetic noise isn't an innovation in marketing strategy—it's an escalation of the content arms race that accelerates ad fatigue.

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

The McKinsey point of view (POV) graphic outlines a traditional consulting framework attempting to map out tech-wave evolution. However, looking closely at its structure reveals several glaring omissions and flawed assumptions..

[McKinsey & Company @McKinsey]

The future of marketing won't be defined by the AI tools companies use.

It will be defined by the capabilities built. Five connected AI capabilities are emerging as the foundation for marketing that learns faster, adapts continuously, and drives growth. https://t.co/RwZXXCAJFL

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

Every column in this POV reads like an IT upgrade rather than a marketing breakthrough. Changing "manually produced creative" to "agentic creative systems that score and generate... at scale" is just faster, cheaper content production.

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

if every brand uses autonomous agents to optimize pricing, content, and discovery for other AI agents, you enter a hyper-optimized vacuum that strips away genuine emotional connection, brand equity, and differentiation.

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

Under "Marketing to AI agents," the graphic assumes a future where bots talk to bots to buy things. While programmatic agent commerce is coming, it creates an insular loop:

[Bill Huber @SourceTransform]

The framework frames tech adoption as a clean, sequential march from left to right ("Current-state" to "Next-frontier"). In reality, technology evolves through non-linear shocks. AI agents won't neatly upgrade legacy CRM rules; they will completely break existing database schemas