If you don’t know how to use AI at work, it doesn’t work well

You need to train people how to use AI, otherwise the results are not great:

Because the real problem here is that to judge something – both during and after production – you have to master the topic you want to judge. And to master a topic you need to practice it for 10,000 hours (yes, yes simplistically – but good enough for this argument, OK). You need to inhabit the problem, develop the skill, fail, fail and try again.

You have to know how to make the thing to understand the thing, to judge the thing, and that’s not knowledge you gain when the finished thing is simply handed to you.

So the people getting the greatest leverage from AI today are often the people who already did their 10,000 hours without it. They know what they want. They know what good looks like. They know when AI has misunderstood them. They know when a plausible answer is missing the point entirely.

And so while AI makes those people extraordinarily productive – because it accelerates execution without replacing their judgment – its plausibility also makes people without that judgement increasingly confident to bypass them.

Which is why, effectively, I believe the enterprise is filling up with slop.

Put another way, as one marketer using AI said:

I used to write, and come up with creative ideas. Now all I do is correct shitty AI outputs. Honestly, it sucks.

Related, once you remove all the tech bottlenecks, you encounter the business bottleneck:

The bottleneck was never typing code. Code was simply where the limit was easiest to see and cheapest to attack.” Clear the code-review stage, and the queue lands in validation. Clear that, and it lands in operations–someone has to own everything that ships. Clear that, and it reaches the hardest stations of all: the business’s ability to decide what’s worth building, and the customer’s ability to absorb the change at all.

I wrote a book a while back called The Business Bottleneck that was about this topic from an agile product development perspective. Once you put a platform in place that made weekly app releases possible, the business has to change how it worked to take advantage of all that.

🔗 AI “workslop” is maddening enough for colleagues, but it could be existential for the organization if we’re not careful!