People often get distracted by the shiny new object.
The evidence that this is happening with AI is undeniable at this point.
CEOs and senior leaders get dazzled by the stories told by the frontier labs. Predictions are abound that these AI systems are so capable that they will replace all knowledge workers. New models or features get released and SaaS stocks tank. Some companies go as far as engaging in massive layoffs, thinking that large chunks of the workforce can be replaced by an army of cheaper AI agents.
AI has many advantageous of course. Despite being a legal professional and trained to see things with a more risk-averse eye, I can still see the various ways that AI can boost productivity, help make sense of unstructured information and uncover blindspots in my thinking.
But I can also see that AI does not solve all problems at once. It is not a silver bullet.
Like any other piece of technology, AI has its limitations. Hallucinations, getting stuck in recursive loops and all the quirks that come with operating large, non-deterministic systems programmed implicitly.
We are still in the very early days in terms of AI diffusion and adoption. Most people are not heavy users of AI, and therefore a minority know how to use it well.
And it is because of this that most people do not understand what AI is and what it is not.
It is not this magical machine that you can one-line prompt and it will immediately give you everything you need.
Yet some people basically have this perception of AI, probably because of the way it gets hyped by its developers. This mistaken perception leads to AI being treated as a solution looking for a problem.
The erroneous thinking here is something like this:
Because AI is apparently so amazing, and because everyone is using it, then surely I or our organisation can also use and benefit from it too?
This is a trap driven by FOMO and exacerbated by clouded judgment.
However, this is not just a case of misunderstanding the technology that AI is. I think there are other important aspects at play here.