Thoughts on AI Adoption Speed
One of the most talked about AI topics is the speed of AI adoption in companies, and the reasons for it.
I want to give some (seemingly) contradictory frames here that I use to think about this myself, and that I hope will be useful to you:
There is massive hype around AI
There is too little hype about how big this is
It's way overblown in many cases, by many people
Companies have always wished they could do the work themselves, not needing people, just like automated factories
Some number of people are still needed in pretty much every company
The smarter and more well-rounded you are, and the better you are with using AI, the more safe (and desirable) you are to companies—even after AI takes hold
Every company has a different calculus for what types of human employees they need, and it varies by team, department, etc.
Some functions will get completely crushed by AI very fast; others will take a very long time or (basically) never get converted
The vast majority of people who resist / refuse using AI will be at a tremendous disadvantage in the workplace (probably not famous wood-workers, for example, but most other people)
The overall tendency in all companies will be to automate as much as possible with AI
Once most of a company is automated with AI (which will take a long time) it will make the remaining human roles even more important (what and why, vs. how)
It's easier to automate roles and people where those things weren't being done very well, or very consistently
Adding AI well inside of businesses will likely create more work, not less. The question is what/who will do that extra work
Some amount of the extra work created by AI will be done by AI, but some amount will require humans. The issue is that the capability bar for which humans will continue to rise, even as AI enables companies to do more and more
Just because AI makes more work for everyone doesn't mean that those who have been phoning it in will be safe. The bar will continue to rise, and it will be at different levels for different industries, companies, teams, etc.
Many people are vulnerable to replacement by AI in their current form, but they would be highly marketable if they became what I call a Human 3.0 version of themselves. This means: they know who they are, they know what they're good at, they're great at articulating that, and they're an expert at using AI to magnify their human capabilities
This means the main response we should have to AI as humans is not to panic (although some of that is understandable), but rather to downshift into a more powerful version of ourselves. A version that is actually MORE desirable in a world full of AI. Because once AI has covered all the stuff that can be done with AI, the stuff that remains will be the most important stuff in the world. Making, building, creating, etc.
The people saying AI will replace all jobs in like 1-3 years are dead wrong. It takes forever to change anything
Even if most companies were presented with a magic God button that tripled profits by pressing it, it would still take multiple months or years to get the meetings together to press it
The people saying that AI won't replace jobs because humans do the work better are dead wrong. It's happening. And nobody is doing it. It's just happening. It's happening to your company; it's not your company doing it to you.
A crude way to think about this is to take the people who say it won't happen and the people who say it will happen in 2 years and find the middle line
A great heuristic for this is the saying that we overestimate major changes in the short term and underestimate them in the longterm.
My guess is that AI adoption is probably the most powerful example of this we'll ever see