AI adoption, ROI, and the mistake everyone seems to be making.

There is a misguided belief in the tech sector that AI is more than a tool.

OpenAI is valued at 300 billion and they paid 6.4 billion for Jony Ive's company - which has no products.

Haven't we seen this before? Didn't stamps.com famously suggest that they could sell stamps at a 2 cent loss if only they could acheive volume? Didn't BIG DATA promise a world of insights and digital twins that would create efficiecies only imagined?

Yeah, they did, and I was there for all of it. Just like I'm here, owning an AI company in the midst of this current wave of histeria. So why? Why would I dive in now?

90% of 'work' has been done before. LLMs are trained on all of what has been done before, making them experts in recreating wheels. Having built and run an Innovation Services product team, I'm well qualified to tell you that innovation is combining adjacent things in new ways....

So imagine my excitement when I realized that AI has all of the knowledge of the past, and can be told to combine it in new ways? That is a goldmine worth millions, if not billions of dollars. (I would know, I charged fractions of it to great success)

The mistake that everyone wants to make is pretty easy to understand. There is a belief that a person, a role, is equal to an output. That is false. Ai is nothing more than a smart keyboard with an unimaginable autocomplete.

There is a belief that productivity is measured at an individual level. Also false.

Clients pay for the end result, not how you get there. They want updates, but only to know that you are making progress.

The point is, your team can take on more clients with AI, but a smaller team is going to have fewer results, and that means fewer clients. It's not math.

AI is an amazing tool. A tool for a job. Not a univeral solution to everything.

BTW. I asked Claude 4.0 to edit this post.... It's not a good tool for hammering this nail....