strategy

Let’s bypass the standard executive summaries and talk frankly about what is actually happening with AI in our departments.

If you sit in enough steering committee meetings the past 12-18 months, you notice a distinct shift in the room when the topic of any “AI”-related topics come up. The initial novelty has completely worn off. We find ourselves thoroughly entrenched in Gartner’s Trough of Disillusionment. From a management perspective, this is exactly where we need to be. The early days of generative AI were dominated by parlor tricks. Seeing a chatbot write a poem or draft a polite email, or generating 7-fingered models for social content were interesting, but general-purpose tools do remarkably little to improve a department’s operating margins, let alone an enterprise’s.