As you can imagine as an engineer and someone who has a Masters degree in Artificial Intelligence I am super excited that AI is finally in a everyday usable state. There are many use cases for AI that I absolutely love – programming my home automation system has become better with the help of Copilot, navigating my large inbox is better with Copilot and my powerpoint presentations have much better graphics nowadays thanks to ChatGPT. It also has some downsides – one being that my son thinks my job is to create Star Wars memes for work (which made my practice townhalls a lot more entertaining). On a serious note there are several cases where AI gets it wrong and I have not found Vibe Coding to be good enough for my use cases yet, not to speak of the large amount of not useful content that is flooding my LinkedIn feed, my email inbox and any even my txt messages.

What this has shown me is that AI will really influence how we work and how we communicate and I was wondering what will we do with all the productivity we will unlock? And then remembered that all too often we don’t really use the productivity well. And I want to use a warning analogy.

Come with me into the past – It is the 1970s and we are at a business conference. I stand on stage and am pitching the next “big thing”. And here comes my pitch – There is this new technology that will create incredible productivity for you. I know many of you are sending documentation to other people in your organisation via mail or tube mail or if it needs to be very fast with a fax machine. The quality and cost of the fax machine is obviously quite limiting. Well with this new technology you will be instantantiously be able to send information at high quality for basically free to anyone anywhere. Can you imagine the productivity improvements we will see from that?!?

Of course I am talking about email which still had to go some way to live up to that promise over the next couple of decades, but the pitch and promise came true. You can send the information at high quality and basically for free and if I take email (and any equivalent capability) away from you, your productivity will drop. But ask yourself whether you feel like email is making you more productive. Or have we found ways to “eat up” that productivity by increasing the volume of emails to the point with low value information? The boat has sailed on email I think – the ongoing war of spam vs spam filters, the intentions to use less email vs the learned behaviour of checking it all the time – all this indicates that the brave new world I pitched in the paragraph above will not come of fruition.

The question I am asking myself is whether or not we will make the same mistakes with AI or whether we will find ways to truly unlock the productivity. I have spent hours with Copilot creating code for me that I could have probably written as fast myself. How can organisations focus on the productive use cases of AI and avoid the pitfalls? I don’t have an answer for this yet, but being conscious of our tendency to “eat up” the productivity that technology creates is a useful first step.