I'm already bored with AI

God, technology trends are exhausting. If there’s one thing the tech industry as a whole has perfected, it’s the art of what I’ll call here Extinction-Level FOMO, the simultaneous carrot and stick of “ooh, this might make my life a bit easier” and “oh, so my career will literally wither and die overnight if I don’t get on this particular bandwagon”.

Credit: Serge Seidlitz/The Observer

Many years ago, I worked at the long-departed Cable&Wireless (RIP) and one of my responsibilities was running the monthly induction days for new starters. It was pretty rubbish to be honest, but one thing that always raised a laugh was an old film from the 1960s which we used to play to demonstrate the impact of telecommunications technology. In it, the film looked to the future where (I kid you not) men (only men, of course) would spend most of their days on the golf course and in the club, because work would have been automated (the women were presumably… baking?). It was, basically, a very early example of the aforementioned carrot, even if it lacked the stick of today’s tech industry propaganda (sorry, PR).

Obviously in recent years, loads of tech advances have arrived to make our lives easier. But have they? In the workplace at least, the answer to that question is… not really. I love the fact that I have Teams meetings every day where I can see people literally all over the world in real time from the comfort of my home office – amazing, transformative stuff. But email (which is finally, FINALLY on the cusp of genuine obsolescence… I think) still takes me hours every day while the proliferation of work systems means I spend half my life trying to remember what I need to log into depending on which client I am working with. Of course there are loads of great tools out there that make us more productive (important distinction, that). But I still seem to be working super hard every day and there’s no sign of my endless days of golfing now or in the foreseeable future (not a bad thing, actually – the only golf I have ever played is of the crazy variety).

Anyway, let’s get back to the point: AI.

I recently went to the HR Tech Exhibition in London and spoke with a bunch of new tech start-ups (always the most interesting bit of the show).

I chatted with one who very proudly told me that they’d built an AI tool that could conduct large scale, global market research. Simply tell it what you wanted to know and it would go away and give you a big report based on billions of data points. I said that sounded cool and asked “What’s your typical use case and who are you going to sell it to?”. The answer (and I am quoting verbatim here): “We don’t know yet.”

And this is where my boredom starts to get really very boring indeed.

AI is not a solution in itself. Slapping an AI label on your applicant screening tech that’s based on an algorithm built 5 years ago does not make it AI. Even the word (well, acronym) “AI” is just too blandly broad to have any meaning anymore. You can’t compare some bullshit image produced by Midjourney (yes, I said it – stop using this rubbish) with a tool that analyses retinal images to enhance, improve and speed up the diagnostic and decision making process in optometry. Ultimately, we should be abandoning the term as soon as possible and just focusing on what the tool in question actually does, for whom and in what circumstances. The trouble is, as long as “AI” is the buzzword that helps build big valuations and derive investment for the tech vendors, we’re stuck with it.

Adding AI to your marketing literature is lazy. You still have to do the hard work. What’s that? Working out what your market is; product development; user persona and ideal customer profile definition; and understanding – and communicating – what problem your solution solves.

If all this comes across as AI cynicism, it isn’t. I’ve spent lots of time with vendors in the TA space recently (both tech and outsourcing vendors) and there is some brilliant, game-changing stuff happening out there that I am genuinely excited about.

But I have also seen a truckload of nonsensical claims, lazy marketing and indistinct propositions.

So yes, I’m bored of AI. I’m bored of businesses failing to listen to the needs of their customers as they fall over themselves to shout “AI!!!” louder than their competition.

The one thing that AI hasn’t changed one bit is the need to understand your market, research it and create a problem-solving proposition that your clients NEED.

So get on with all of that and maybe we can all start to get a bit more interested again. After all, as Harvey Danger so famously said in Flagpole Sitta, if you're bored then you're boring. And no one wants to be accused of that.