Meanwhile, AI has kind of quietly become part of the fabric of our lives — not by changing our lives or taking our jobs or becoming sentient, but by making our lives and our jobs easier. For example, when I Googled “When will AI become sentient?” (and “When did Skynet become self-aware,” for comparison purposes), I didn’t have to comb through results one at a time but instead read the AI-generated summary of the most relevant content at the top, with sources. (Spoiler alert: Opinions are mixed.)
There are hundreds of other examples of AI applications that are, well, pretty boring but really useful. What’s a lot less boring right now is scaling and integrating AI across the organization. And that’s where the AI backlash can be leveraged.
Making AI usefully boring
Developers, engineers, operations personnel, enterprise architects, IT managers, and others need AI to be as boring for them as it has become for consumers. They need it not to be a “thing,” but rather something that is managed and integrated seamlessly into — and supported by — the infrastructure stack and the tools they use to do their jobs. They don’t want to endlessly hear about AI; they just want AI to seamlessly work for them so it just works for customers.