AI Changes the Dynamics of Power in our Work, our Workflows, and in the Workplace
And 10 links that might keep you busy.
Hey y’all!
I’m tired as all get out but I’m excited to be working with a new team developing products in the artificial intelligence space! I can’t speak to the specifics of what we’re building due to some of the customers that we presently have but I can say that we’ve combined a proprietary LLM with knowledge graphs to solve large and complex enterprise problems.
Not precisely the sexiest thing but I think it’s important to keep the language simple, especially with new technology; it’s hard enough to get people to even think properly about (generative) AI let alone get them to buy into it psychologically and then make a purchasing decision.
On that note I’ve been thinking a lot about this interview with Marissa Mayer who spoke about her new AI startup — this is what she had to say:
Our thesis for the company is there are just a lot of mundane tasks that just get in the way. It's true for a lot of things: contacts, calendaring, scheduling, all those different components take a lot of friction. We think by applying AI – not even necessarily in cutting edge ways — you can both solve valuable problems and you can give people back time. You can also build their confidence in AI.
I’m not a superfan of Marissa but she’s insanely experienced building products for a lot of people and I can appreciate how she uses simple language, focused on human behavior, to speak clearly about the challenges she’s attempting to investigate and the solutions that her team is cooking up.
I really like how she mentions two things:
You don’t have to use “cutting edge” technology to solve meaningful problems.
It’s all about building “confidence” in AI and the outcomes it produces.
Things are quickly changing and the role that we all have to play in our own professional spaces are definitely going to change; the question isn’t if but when and, like I’ve talked in this newsletter a bunch, the quicker you can start to adapt and evolve the better.
Even more specifically in the areas that I swim, like engineering and design, I see the two coming together in very novel ways. Replit’s VP of Design had this to say about the coming convergence:
Whether you currently work more in engineering or design, AI offers augmentation for you to do both. Engineering and design are on a course to become one tightly woven discipline. At Replit, we’re focused on building Artificial Developer Intelligence (ADI), not Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). We want to build something that gives people more autonomy and makes them more productive. Collaboration and AI, these are two very foundational pillars in how we think about our ADI strategy.
I hadn’t used the term ADI before but I do like the idea of the two becoming a “tightly woven discipline” — in a lot of ways they have been but have been done by different people. Now, a single person can do a lot of both and as the designer learns to do more code and as the developer learns to do more of the design I see the collaboration techniques changing as well as the inevitable workflows.
This leads me back to a quote from Levie that I shared previously that I’ve been thinking about quite a lot:
AI is going to have a profound impact on the enterprise. Software and IT teams in companies have been responsible for enabling tech for people to do their work. Now with AI, they’ll be providing the work itself. This is a fundamental shift in the power structure in companies.
As with most things technology will simultaneously enable us to do more work as well as bring us the work for us to do; the (power) structure will just fundamentally shift.
And it’s the power dynamics that should be at the forefront of all of our thinking, how we gain it as well as lose it with the advent of AI.
Have a great rest of your day friends!
※\(^o^)/※
— Summer
10 links that might keep you busy:
