The future is closer than it appears – and CxOs won’t like what’s in the mirror

[Bias filter] I’m not a research scholar with an advanced degree, a serial entrepreneur, or a social-media AI influencer. I’m someone who has spent four decades inside enterprise technology cycles, a good chunk of it at Intel, watching hype outrun substance more than once. If that’s still useful to you, read on. [End of bias filter]

Here’s the CxO’s actual dilemma – your board wants an AI story, your competitors are announcing one, and the fastest way to produce one is to sign a check before you’ve done the readiness work. Gartner’s own research pegged the share of generative AI projects abandoned after proof-of-concept at roughly 30 percent, not because the models failed, but because no one asked what problem they were solving before funding them.

I remain appalled by technology leaders, many of whom built the very systems in question, have now resort to fearmongering instead of an objective, balanced view. The open letter signed by a thousand researchers asking for a six-month pause was, to me, the equivalent of Detroit’s big three raising safety concerns about Tesla’s self-driving software. If they’re genuinely worried about job losses, will they stop automating their own factories? Will they slow their own customer-support automation rollouts?

The statement – Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable – sounds kiddish at best. Give me ONE example where any technology is developed after the creators of the technology are confident that its effects will be positive and risks manageable. The open letter was just a joint pleading to give them enough time to catch up as some of them were caught off-guard.

Before you fund the next AI initiative, run it through what I call the Automation Substitution Test. Would this investment still get approved if the vendor pitch used the word ‘automation’ instead of ‘AI’? If the answer is no, you’re not funding a capability, you’re funding a vocabulary, and Gartner’s 30% statistic will have your name on it.

Just like the passenger-side mirror warns that objects are closer than they appear, keep this in view. The future is closer than it appears, and it may not be to your liking.

My interest in AI started decades ago with science fiction and Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. I’ve been learning about it and experimenting, whenever possible, with it ever since. Three decades ago, writing contrarian opinion pieces for magazines that never won me a popularity contest and this blog probably won’t either.

But, if your board’s AI story and your actual AI readiness have started to diverge, that’s a conversation worth having before the write-off, not after. Happy to compare notes.

More than three decades ago when I used to write for magazines, I would share my strong opinions that were usually seen as contrarian to the prevailing narrative at that moment. Needless to say, my articles never won me any popularity contest. I’m sure this blog of mine is not going to help me either. But then, ask me if I care 😊