AI Apocalypse… Not! | Shimmy Says Ep. 28

Hey everyone, it's Shimmy, and welcome to another Shimmy. Says, uh, sorry for not missing, uh, doing, not doing it on my usual Thursday. We're doing this Friday, but, you know, Jewish holidays and all.

Um, anyway, I wanted to talk to you all today about the AI apocalypse or AI apocalypse. We are hearing more and more about just AI being the root of all evil. It's destroying our jobs, it's destroying the minds of our youth.

It's making us lazy. It's not working like it's supposed to. It, you know, and, and guys, you can't have it both ways.

Either it's really good and it is doing all these things, or it's not really good and it's not doing all these things, but to say both. Well, I guess it could be, um, you know, if we're in the quantum universe, it could be both yes and no, right? But Quantum Q Day is not quite here yet, though I have heard about how AI is actually gonna be the catalyst for, for Quantum.

Um, in any event though, you know, I, I wanted to bring my own outlook on this. This is gonna be, I have a birthday coming this month, big birthday for me. And I've, you know, it's, it's made me reflect, it's caused me to reflect on 35, 40 years in business.

And all of the things I've seen come and go in water under the bridge. And I'm not saying any of it was, or most of it, or all of it was anywhere near as disruptive as AI can be. But I don't think we need to rewrite the rules.

We're not in the new paradigm. It's not the new normal. These are things that, you know, I, I think the AI adoption curve and what AI's going to do is going to follow, at least in a broad level, the, the outline of what we've seen other technologies do.

Maybe in a bigger way, maybe not, but it's still gonna follow that model. And I, I think we, it's very hard when you're in the forest, right? You see trees, but you don't see the forest.

And, and this is a problem, this is a problem. I think people need to see the forest for what it is. AI is, is helping us, right?

I recent survey we talked about on the gang this week, 90% of developers are using ai. Something like 40% don't trust it. 66% say it, it increases instability, but yet 90% are using it.

So if you have those kinds of numbers, what is that really telling you, right? It's telling you that you, you people are using it. They're seeing value in it.

What, where I think the issue is, is we haven't been able to translate that value from an individual using it to a team, using it to an enterprise using it. And make no mistake, there's a difference between usage of an individual to a team, to an enterprise, right? At the enterprise level.

It's gotta be really scalable. It's gotta be really locked down. The processes have to be in place.

The team is sort of that in between, between the individual and the enterprise. I'm gonna come back to it, but at the individual level, it's about experimentation. It's about trying it out.

It's about trying new things, trying it in different ways and seeing how it works. It's a really great thing and I think it will continue to be, um, at the team level, you need it to be flexible enough for several individuals, but you don't need the full scalability, the full process driven type of implementation that you see at the enterprise level. And that, that triumvirate right there, those three different use cases is I think what's driving a lot of the, of the churn and burn a lot of the discussion in the AI market today.

I think at a team level, it's succeeding as you would expect it to. Well, excuse me, I think at the individual level it's succeeding as you would expect it to. I think teams are figuring it out or trying to figure it out and making some progress.

I think at the enterprise level, look, there's always a lag. I think it's gonna take two, three years for us to really see this at the enterprise level. But in the meantime, you've got CEOs who are laying people off, not hiring as much if you believe the, the press because AI is going to do it.

And, and there's, there is this AI gap, there's this gap between perceived functionality, perceived, uh, you know, abilities versus the reality of it today. And, and it's gonna make for a rocky, bumpy road. Make no mistake about that.

This is gonna be a rocky, bumpy road and I think we're gonna have to kind of, you know, strap ourselves in as we, we ride over that road. But for those of you who are consultants working in small teams, individual contributors, I'm every CEO, every exec team I've seen is passing the word down, experiment with it, use it, see what it could do because we're still kinda stretching the envelope here are stretching the borders on how this all comes together. So AI apocalypse, not ai, enterprise grade, unfortunately not either, but lots of good use for AI at the team level and in the individual level.

You bet. That's Shimmy says for this week. Have a great one, everyone.

We'll see you next week. Says, says.