Anyone with a reasonably sized tech network on LinkedIn will be familiar with the enthusiastic chatter between start-up founders about how Ai is transforming their potential, the efficiency of their business and staffing. There is little of the tech skepticism visible in the posts from the employees of tech businesses, who understandably are more wary of Ai as a tool of class conflict, and how it might be use to remove jobs and keep salaries down. Between the two viewpoints, there are a lot of unlikely claims about what Ai can actually do. The reason founders are more succeptable to this sort of magic thinking is likely to be down to their own experience.
To head up a reasonably funded, growing business, there were probably two stages to the journey:
- The early stage, where everything – coding, product marketing, funding, recruiting had to be done by oneself
- The point where things started to grow – when finances allowed specialists into the business, who then attempted to replace all of these early efforts.
Ai as related to this experience potentially then offers:
- In the first stage, an assistant who can take away all of the painful multi-tasking, get everything to good enough at speed, getting the ideas to market at breakneck speed with low effort
- Professional level assistance with design, engineering, marketing – all the roles occupied by expensive and critical staff members who complain about the product so far, while seemingly operating at a slower pace then you ever did in the first
The fallacies around this wishful thinking are as thus:
- The difference between you and all the people sitting around with unrealised great ideas is you did it. All the hard stuff – that was the distance between you, and all the unrealised potential competition. Give the tools to make it easy for everyone, and how do you compete?
- Ai is excellent at good-enough, and truly terrible at anything beyond that. That slow, expensive grind of doing better? That is your competitive edge. There is no silver bullet, just faster routes to mediocrity
