I see a lot of discussion here about over-hyped AI, and then I see the huge AI bubble at my workplace, in news, in PR statements, etc.
Are there folks who work at companies – especially interested in those in tech – that have a reasonable handle on AI’s practical uses and its limitations?
Where I work, there’s:
- a dashboard of AI usage by team and individual, which will definitely not affect performance review in any way
- a mandate to use one AI tool last month, and this month a new one to abandon that tool and adopt a different one
- quarterly goals where almost every one has some amount of “with AI” in it
- letters from the CEO asking which teams are using AI to implement features from ticket descriptions, or (inspired by the news) use flocks of agents, asking for positives without mention of asking for negatives
- a team creating a review pipeline for AI-generated output in our product, planning to review the quality of the output… using AI
- teammates are writing code and designs and sending them for review without ensuring functionality or pruning irrelevant portions, despite a statement that everyone is responsible for reviewing AI output
Is all the resistance to overuse of AI grassroots and is the pressure for rampant adoption uniform among executives/investors? Or are some companies or verticals not drinking the koolaid?
The company I work for builds a product that uses AI extensively. The product would not be possible without AI, like the one main thing the product does is only possible because of AI. That said, AI use for coding is quite limited. We talk about it, some people do develop with AI, but there is no push for it. I feel like building a product on it has made developers acutely aware of just how flakey and unreliable AI is.
Sales must love you.