The usual hot takes revolve around the use of agentic AI for coding, but let's talk about the other business uses for AI. There are various ways to spin up your own domain-specific model. Maybe you want to predict what users need based on past behavior, connect people looking for dates, or find patterns in loads of data. There are a lot of ideas out there that just became a lot easier to implement.
I read a quarterly earnings statement recently that mentioned AI 70 times. Their adjacent shareholder letter mentioned it 60 times. If you're an investor, maybe you care, for another quarter, but the fact that a company is using AI does not make them special. If everyone uses AI, no one is special for that. (This company's stock price did not change on this release, and in fact it went down.)
But the biggest mistake is talking about AI to your end users. I can tell you with certainty that they don't care about AI. They care about the problems your software will solve for them. AI is an implementation detail, and is about as important to them as the language you use to build your stuff, which is to say, not at all.
Let me use the LinkedIn trope of a single-sentence paragraph: AI is an implementation detail.
Worse yet, if you're hollering about AI instead of the outcomes you should be selling, you might lose a significant share of customers. Stanford's AI Index Report shows that more than half of those surveyed say that products that use AI make them nervous. Even though it's not an apples comparison, you also see growing backlash in creative communities, as well as in certain medical and psychology fields. And don't even get me started about the anti-datacenter movement. Are you sure you want to associate your product with that?
I'm not saying that AI is good or bad, because that's a complicated and nuanced discussion. I think it's an essential tool for an endless number of business cases. But saying that you use AI in your product is like saying that your car has wheels. It doesn't really mean anything. When containerization caught on, you didn't see people shouting, "Our product now runs in containers!" Nobody cares.
What you can describe is the outcomes you can provide. Your online store can point users at the products they actually need. You can make that romantic match. You can help people see patterns in their data. That's where the value lies, not in the fact that you used AI.
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