Whenever we say some work is going to be difficult and time consuming now, management reflexively ask if we can fix it with AI. It’s like an excitable little kid getting a bicycle for their birthday and wanting to do everything on their bicycle now, including eating, sleeping and homework.
The problem is that the areas us consumers would want it is not going to be place that companies put it. They’re gunning as hard as they can to monetize and minimize costs. Not what is most useful
Those cases are probably not profitable and will become enshitifcated when the VC money runs out and they start trying to turn a profit, so enjoy it while it lasts 😂
“AI” is great for first drafts/seeing a different wording, and automating very tedious crap. For instance, I really like taking proposals I write, dropping them into ChatGPT and saying “write me a 200 word executive summary,” then taking whatever it spits out to start making my own.
“Co-pilot” is a great way of thinking about it. I have no idea if that actual product is any good, but I know when I started thinking of AI tools as kind of a copilot of sorts, it made a lot more sense to me. It illustrates the limitations as well. Though I’d say more it’s more accurately “assistant to the pilot.” If you take me out of the seat, it can’t drive the vehicle and everyone will be upset with the results
Too many companies are falling for the loudest marketing in the room when it comes to AI. They see a shiny, perfectly curated demo and go “huh that seems neat we should do it” regardless of its relevance. They’re looking for shiny features and add-ons. What they should be thinking about is the very tedious, particularly manual tasks that eat up an inordinate amount of their time on a weekly basis. The AI solutions they should be looking for are ones that reduced or eliminate those tasks.
AI can be very useful at saving time. Too many people are using it as a solution in search of a problem. I think the best application for AI involve our day-to-day work, not consumer facing solutions.
making them better would mean more work, stress and ill conceived requirements for the programmers. I’m more in favor of marketing thrashing about on their own.
If you look back at the sci-fi movies that came out soon after lasers were invented, you could see that people had all sorts of crazy ideas of what a laser could be used to do and that a lot of them had absolutely no idea of what a laser really did. Ultimately, we’ve found out that most of those imagined uses were pure bullshit or extremely impractical, at least with the current state of the technology. It didn’t mean that the technology was useless. We ended up finding all sorts of useful purposes for it that they had never imagined, like disk players or barcode scanners. It only means that it took time for people to better understand what the real world applications of the new technology was and a lot of the initial assumptions were dead wrong.
AI is going through the same process. It will take time before the technology’s strengths and weaknesses are better understood by the masses so it can be better applied to more realistic uses. And for the commercialization of snake-oil applications for it remains confined to fringe markets.
I mean you CAN just get an evening marketing job, 8-5 engineering, half hour break, 5.30-1:30am writing marketing copy, designing campaigns, A/B testing, budget management, demand gen, lead gen, sales enablement, CRO/CPC/CAC management, Martech tool alignment, attribution tracking, SEO research, content marketing, press releases and 3P distribution tools, all of which matched against brand voice and targeting to ABM the specific ICP within each vertical.
I mean I’m kidding around, but really, most of the time we’re making a product to sell, and then selling the product to make more of it (or a new/better version of it) so that we can sell it more… so we can make it more… to sell more…
Its just all part of the same cycle. The OP meme could equally be:
I understand there’s some jest in this expression but I strongly object. I work tuning queries and doing that awful database shit yall dread and I find a lot of fulfillment in supporting devs and providing a better user experience.
I can guarantee you I’d be stuck in the deepest depths of depression if I tried a career in sales. Job satisfaction is high enough a priority for me that I’m currently wrestling with my dumbass PE overlords to stop trying to bankrupt our company even as they underpay me by an embarrassing amount.
Yea, but, alternatively, sales could just stop being entitled pricks. I’ve worked with sales people that were excellent - they had a technical mind and were able to grasp what our product could and couldn’t do and, if they were uncertain… they would fucking ask me. And I’ve worked with sales people that won’t tell me they made a sale until two months later when the deadline is a week away.
Best software salesman I ever met was the best because he knew how to fucking listen. He worked for an electrical engineering software company. First time I ever met the guy, he flies into town to meet with my employer, his client, for the first time after taking over the account. I called him up and asked if I could buy him dinner the night before the big meeting, basically to warn him that they’re on the verge of getting fired.
Dude walks into the meeting the next day with nothing but a pen and a legal pad, introduces himself, and says something like, “I’m not happy because I’ve heard you all are not happy. I’m going to do whatever I can to fix that so I want you to tell me every single problem you’re having no matter how small you think it is.” And they let him have it for a good two hours. He took it like a champ, listened to and documented every single complaint, and made an actual effort to get fixes for the things we were upset about. He saved a $2 million a year account just by listening and making an effortto help keep the customer happy.
I guess the moral of the story is, good salespeople don’t sell products. They solve problems.
Which is fine with me tbh because fuck sales. I’d never survive independently, because I’d tell the customer the truth. And the truth doesn’t sell. I don’t have the energy to lie about how everything is better than it actually is.
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