I’ve just been thinking for a while as I talk to people and watch what is going in the technology space as people use more and more AI tools and they become more powerful, is it actually wasting a lot of people’s time & driving inefficiencies in organisations?
Now let’s thing about it, you can give AI a task and off it goes, then while it’s doing that you give it another and another. Then come back to the first one and go again. Then you can find you have 15 things that have all progressed 10% and none of these things have moved the needle at all.
Now I’m not saying that this is something that is happening everywhere but it is something that is happening. The thing that got me thinking about this is I have been receiving snapchats from one of my friends who is vibecoding out a clinical record management system for storing client/participant information. Then my brain just goes to how are you going to secure this? How are you going to host it? Where will the data live, what change management & support do you have in place, etc. now not saying this isn’t covered in what he is building out, but I know he has little understanding on how the underlying technology works.
How much time and resources gets put into these types of things that then never actually get off the ground?
Also what is the organisational risk if these applications do just go live? What do you do if there is a breach and you are the one “responsible” for building this massive security hole in your organisations data?
Once again not saying that this is happening in this case but it is a real consideration and something that I wouldn’t be comfortable making.
So then the next point is the time investment. I see all these people with AI trying to get more out of it, but a lot of the stuff takes them longer to AI it then it would have just doing it manually. I spend half a day a recently making a proposal generator, now it is probably 80% complete, but realistically it saves me around 3 minutes each time I run it & I still have to go through and check it and fix it, on top of that I am actually loosing the chance to flesh out the presentation of the proposal and don’t know it as in depth as when I have put it together myself. So here I am now with this tool that I might use 5 times a month, that sometimes does strange things and I need to double check its work…. That wasn’t the most effective use of 1/2 a day was it? But on the other hand now I do know how to do this sort of thing if I need to, but once again maybe I should have just gone out and seen two more clients that day rather then going down the rabbit hole.
Look the things these tools are unlocking is really cool, but maybe sometimes we are better off doing the basics well and not trying to use AI just because it is there.
I think the way to go is to find a problem that you want to solve with technology then find the best solution, that may be using AI, but it also might not be, just because you have AI doesn’t mean go and use AI for everything.
Imagine if we have everyone a screwdriver & said apply this to every problem!!
anyway, that’s what I have been pondering so I figured I would just blog it as I haven’t posted in ages.
