The Hardest Thing To Do In Business Right Now Is…

So… AI was supposed to make all the business things easier.

And in some sense, that happened, on a few different fronts. Basically Wave 1 of AI, Gen AI, was just a much more targeted search apparatus and an integration with basic business tools like email. And then… essentially, everyone in Big Corporate (and small corporate) was using chatbots to make Powerpoints, and this is still going on and it’s annoying.

On reflection, Wave 1 of AI was not the panacea it was sold to be. And that’s fine, I wrote a million columns on that while it was happening. We’re all still standing. Well, most of us.

If there’s a common thread among those “things that got made easier,” it’s how “dumb” all those things were. So yeah. The dumb things got a lot easier to do.

On a side note, this is where a lot of my irritation with AI-generated content in the place of human-written content becomes palpable. Writing is not dumb and never will be dumb. Writing is a skill that is way more than just barfing words onto a page. But I digress.

Even with AI-assisted coding, probably AI’s most visible and effective contribution to the business landscape – and at an enormous cost, I might add, now that a lot of the bills have come due – AI is really good at creating all the dumb code pieces required to slap a system together.

But AI will build whatever the hell you want, and if you, the “coder,” don’t take the time and have the logical knowledge to connect those dumb pieces into a smart system, you’re on a fast path to heartbreak. Luckily, this has become way more doable over the last six months.

Anyway, my point is, there are a few things, like writing – understanding complex concepts and distilling them in a way that’s engaging – that have no dumb in them. And AI isn’t good at those things and might never be good at them.

Now, you can get away with not having solid writing for a business, you really can. It’ll suck, but it can be done. There’s one area where you really can’t not have it, and I don’t think AI ever makes this thing easier.

And since this is a private post, not a public column, I’m not gonna make you wait for the payoff.