What this article is trying to say is selling benefits vs features

Which description below interests you more?

A: "The GeeWhiz personal helicopter: the most efficient, best helicopter ever. Its dual cast aluminum blades spin at an incredible 600 revolutions per minute. It's as silent as a mouse's fart. It weighs only 750 pounds thanks to its innovative carbon alloy frame."

B: "Cut your commute time in half with the GeeWhiz personal helicopter"

B probably got your attention more, unless you have a personal interest in helicopters. Most people don't, they just want to know what it can do for them. Your eyes may have glazed over A because it was a bunch of words you don't care about.

A lot of people lean into feature marketing because either THEY are excited about it or they want to dazzle you - feature bombing is a real thing. For example you are NOT going to go drive up some huge rocks like the trucks in the commercials do - it just gives you a warm fuzzy. But it belongs AFTER you convince the person of the why it matters. In this case, they're reaching people who want a truck, they're deciding which truck.

i still, deep down, identify as being "smart". i don't like being wrong, and it's my go-to ego lick at work, "well bad thing x may have happened, but at least I'm still valued for being smart". it was my label in high school that i've never quite shed.

obviously now i have so many more facets - father, husband, leader, writer/reader. Smartness is just raw horsepower, it's what you do with it that matters. And there's lots of kinds of "smarts". As an example, my wife wasn't the traditional "book smart" but she's emotionally & street smart - knows how to get things done, how to think on her feet, etc.

but still despite that increased richness from life experience, I'm still "smart" and hold on to it

"It's not the naked man on your lawn waving a chainsaw that's scaring you. It's the burrito you ate for lunch: it went down easy, but now it's coming for you"

However I noticed that whether a team member thought for a day, or thought for a week, the result was essentially the same. The tactics may have more details but the overall plan and impact id expect was roughly the same. They had blind spots, opportunities that could make it more impactful that only came to light when they talked thru it.

So for me, it was better to touch base sooner than later and get the broad plan right, then let them figure out the details and get to it

(Note I work in marketing, not engineering)

"What does this team do? Answer customer tickets? Well let's replace with AI!"

Just create some space. Sit with them. Things will eventually make sense. Or not, some mysteries don't get solved. Either way you'll find a path forward.

A real doctor is accountable.

They might both "know" a lot of things but implicitly the party who is accountable is going to be more trustworthy.

And I don't see that going away until AI companies must be licensed for application x and can lose their license / be sued if engaging in malpractice.

The VC business model is predicated on extreme growth. The last thing you would want to do is siphon dividends out vs reinvesting into growth.

They must have preyed on newbie founders, dangling large valuations. Oh the fees? Well you will make it big and it will be a drop in the bucket!

The company I work for is currently trying to accelerate internal AI adoption, and recently laid off people to help force it. As I've written here before, this merely pools accountability (not removing it) and things will break in unexpected ways as people are not domain experts in these new areas added to their jobs.

I wonder if we will see a large reversal in a few years, or if AI will somehow be able to fix this too

People move from a farm to the city. If there's no more white collar jobs where do we go for work? It's unprecedented

It doesn't disappear when you make 1 person do the work of 3. It simply is aggregated

Suppose you had a pod of a PM, designer, and analyst. Leadership lays off the designer and analyst and now the PM can move faster with AI. Hooray!

Well...when the complaints about how it looks on xyz device roll in, who is implementing that? Or you launch the product with much fan fare, adoption is terrible - you double check the numbers and oops, the sizing you had from Claude was actually 10x off.

Who is holding the bag? You are! Not Claude

I'm convinced this is one reason we are seeing slower than expected adoption of AI broadly in tech companies, because it's hard to trust - we know Claude can make mistakes but how do you know what's right vs not? Most people don't want to sense check so they just keep doing the work the way they know best.

I think this could be one thing that pops the AI bubble - execs try to force this, people go along, and results are not any better for this reason. Sure you save some salaries and ship more quickly, but you don't build the right thing and you are fixing more things after launch. Which one is actually better?

The drug reduces AHI by 4. It could only cure very mild sleep apnea. Otherwise it seems most useful as an additional treatment with CPAP.

It could also help raise awareness of sleep apnea - try the drug first. Don't see any changes? Ok now try CPAP.