This is how I feel, especially with companies adding “AI Use” to their performance reviews. If employees found it helpful, they’d use it. Or did you hire complete morons?

I’ve built several AI tools for my work which do increase productivity. They lean in to what AI is actually good at and improve the speed of getting information, like using AI embeddings to build a quick semantic search, and building MCP tools for agents to look up information in our systems quickly. I’ve built some AI based tools to automate very expensive tasks that require a ton of manual data curation and review, and it works at the same level as our staff doing it, and it runs in 20 minutes, that’s a win.

People actually do use these tools because they save a significant amount of time with very little cost, and everyone gets to do the things they’re actually good at.

Now I’m being asked to spearhead building out customer facing AI efforts. I knew this day would come, but yeah the board and investors want it. They really want to be able to tell investors and clients that we’re an AI forward company.

I’ve been planning for this and researching/studying, and all the internal tools I’ve built have been test runs. I’m not going to force AI on users, but I am going to build tools and systems for the ones who do use AI.