“Every single Monday was called ‘AI Monday,’” Vaughan said, with his mandate for staff that they could work only on AI. “You couldn’t have customer calls; you couldn’t work on budgets; you had to only work on AI projects.” He said this happened across the board, not just for tech workers, but also for sales, marketing, and everybody else at IgniteTech. “That culture needed to be built. That was the key.”
He REALLY hates paying employees and wants their pennies in his treasure horde, we get it.
He will be shocked when he discovers the shareholders don’t want to pay him, either. He’ll be like “what?!?! AI doing MY job? This is a travesty!” and then they will have robot security drag him out of the building screaming.
A recent MIT report indicates that 95% of generative AI pilots fail to deliver measurable returns on investment, highlighting significant challenges in successfully implementing AI in businesses
CEOs:
What the fuck is IgniteTech?
An “enterprise-software powerhouse”, allegedly. Basically they bought an AI startup and decided that this was their entire personality now.
Exactly
It is never the technology at fault. When it comes down to it, evil people want to exercise the power of their crown, damned be the consequences and injustice.
AI is just the latest excuse to be a remorseless dickhead.
Vaughan was surprised to find it was often the technical staff, not marketing or sales, who dug in their heels. They were the “most resistant,” he said, voicing various concerns about what the AI couldn’t do, rather than focusing on what it could. The marketing and salespeople were enthused by the possibilities of working with these new tools, he added.
So the people that had an actual idea of what the implications of using it might be weren’t on board? Huh. Weird.
“All the engineers said my “screen door on a submarine” was “stupid” and would “sink the ship”, so I fired them and hired new engineers!”
- CEO of now defunct “Screen Door Subs Inc.”
speaking of submarines, this is the exact line of thinking that turned an idiot CEO into a paste at the bottom of the ocean
I told AI to build me a submarine out of
titaniumcarbon fiber.- Stockton Rush (if he were alive today)
Titanic sub was made from carbon fiber. Titanium is what he should have used.
Damnit, I knew that too. I stopped skimming too early in the Wiki paragraph.
The entire pressure vessel for the crew used five major components: two hemispherical titanium end caps, two matching titanium interface rings, and the 142 cm (56 in) internal diameter, 2.4-meter-long (7.9 ft) carbon fiber-wound cylindrical hull.[15] The forward hemispherical end cap could be detached from its interface ring, becoming a hatch that allowed crew members to enter the crew compartment before a mission, and exit at its conclusion.[3]
Like the guy with the carbon fiber submarine. Every engineer told him it couldn’t be done, so he kept firing them until he had a staff of young, inexperienced engineers who would do what they were told, and just collect their paychecks.
Now their boss is dead, and there are no more paychecks.
Well at least that problem fixed itself.
Seeing these kinds of people harness AI is so embarrassing. They feel empowered while doing some of the whackest stuff. In the end, it is still technical style work snd they are still awful at it.
This reads like a very weird AI circlejerk. They repeatedly mention that AI is the solution every company should adopt, but fail to provide a single example of succesful application. And I mean a how not a reult. They say ‘company X KPI are this % better thanks to AI’, but not how they applied it. Just talk of AI mindset, and ‘culture’ but I would have liked to understand what exactly it was used for (like agents, chatbots, automation of something in particular). It just reads like a lot of patting in the back and hot air so far, which is a pity because I would be interested in reading about real life cases of successful AI implementaiom
They say ‘company X KPI are this % better thanks to AI’
They asked an LLM for the KPIs and it helpfully made up the figures they wanted to see.
Which became a self fulfilling prophecy once they showed those awesome “results” to the investors.
Of course it’ll all come crashing down once the investors ask for a return on their investment and there are no more new investors to support the pyramid, but by that point someone (probably not the brainrotten CEOs, who are drinking their own coolaid) will be far away with the money in a Cayman Islands bank account…
I used to joke that the CEO of my former employer must subscribe to some magazine called “CEO Weekly” in which they must periodically mention, in a similar “no examples of usage, just KPIs” manner, webchat. She would always forget about it promptly and then random number of weeks later bug my boss again.
I told him if they want me to come up with how they can use webchat and be their solutions designer they need to double my salary. $60k USD was not enough for being a tier 3 systems admin, a fax and telephony specialist, and figuring out their use cases for them just to check a box that says “we have it!”
“I am bad at managing my finances, and eventually need to get bailed out by the government, or end up next to the homeless guy I used to make fun of”.
- This guy.
This is a paid promotion. Its one of the ones you pay an extra $1000 and they hide the sponsored tag.
Native advertising for the uninitiated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising
John Oliver has a good bit on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc
The question I put to management is “What do you want me to use AI for?”
I can’t get a consistent answer. Lots of stuff unrelated to my job duties. “Well, it’s so easy to make Facebook ads!” - “You know that’s not a thing I do, right?”
They don’t have an answer because they don’t know either. They’ve bought into the idea, and invested trillions, and now they’re all hoping to just churn the cream until it turns into something else, but they have no idea what it will be, or how to use it.
They’re just hoping some minion finally figures out a profitable model, so they can claim it as their own, give him a nominal raise and a nice office, and they can go make trillions off his idea.
This clickbait title format is getting really old. 5 years later, I wish editors would pick something else.
When all of this is over, if this ever ends, I want psychologists to study this AI obsession CEOs have now. I want to see how they can look at AI and insist that everyone be forced to use something that hinders them rather than help.
Greed and lack of empathy?
Previously I added to my routine, to ask two stupid queries of ai every day, because that was the metric we were judged on. I can get that out of the way quickly, and get to my work.
Now we have to use a new ai tool that has a lot more telemetry, thanks Microsoft. Unfortunately I don’t know what metric they are using and the tool spies on everything. I can’t even just not use the ai features because the tool is horrible
The basic stats I can see are the prompt count, number of active days, and last active date. By default reports are anonymised but that can be turned off by the admin.
Iirc paid licenses let you do data purview searches on prompts. But I can’t see that in my one as we only use the basic.
If this dickhead is so smart, why does he even need a staff? I’m sure he can go start a company all by himself with just AI to work for him.
I assume that’s the goal he’s aiming for. Wonder who will buy his stuff when it’s just CEOs and their AI still employed.
That will never happen unless CEOs can actually explain what they want.
If this guy is such a genius why doesn’t he tell us what exactly AI is for and whether it is beneficial to society at large?
I hope his schmeckel no longer works.
