In 1862 the USA produced the Homestead Act which allowed people to claim 160 acres of government surveyed land. This was as long as they hadn’t taken up arms against the government and they had to improve the land whilst they were on it.
This act was developed as a result of the increase in population influenced by the goldrush amongst other things. There were significant winners and losers, people who didn’t realise how tough mining was and what technology was required to maximise the outputs from such activities. In many ways I liken the current technological landscape in a similar way;
How do you survive and thrive in the “goldrush” that is the explosion of AI and its potential to dominate technology for generations to come.
I vividly remember a technologist friend of mine being so excited by the release of ChatGPT in December 2022. We had lunch and he exclaimed the virtues of this new tech and likened it to the same impact as when Google was first shown to the world, his mind was blown and he convinced me over lunch that I should be as excited.
In those early days the excitement and energy was confined to the tech community and those interested friends and families who played with the tech, asking it stupid questions, made up silly songs about your neighbours and generally tried to think about the potential use of this interesting new technology.
Fast forward nearly two and half years and the speed of change, adoption, excitement, fear and opportunity is louder than I can possibly have imagined, but how much is still hype and how much is transforming the world around us.
I’ve spent the last few months trying to speak to companies who are doing very interesting and transformational things in this space. The initial findings are mixed and generally fall into 4 main categories;
Efficiency and productivity improvements – everyone is or should be looking at this
Some niche/very specific use cases – AI analysis of brain scans, AI spotting humans overboard (at night), AI spotting pain in the human face for locked in syndrome
Agentic AI – The emergence of Agents making decisions is the developing at pace – Gartner suggests 15% of day to day decisions will be made by agents in 2028
Charlatans! – You know who you are, the ones who profess to be using AI but in fact are either deliberately mislabelling an algorithm or using it as a marketing tool
My initial response from speaking to end clients, consultancies and other recruitment companies is that whilst there are lots of proof of concepts (POCs), new thinking, new teams focusing on potential use cases there are not yet many transformational use cases being released to the world that I imagine will come.
The majority of consultancies I’ve spoken to are mainly talking LLMs, productivity and cost reductions to their customers whilst most are pumping resources and energy into agents as well the more “traditional” ML & NLP. The fact is that people are learning on the job, we’re all trying to pivot to demonstrate we have services or products that use AI.
As an aside, our CRM system Bullhorn has released its latest iteration which includes a built in AI assistant. Bullhorn are a global leader in recruitment CRMs so can spend millions on R&D much more than we could even dream of so we’ll benefit from AI without having to develop our own.
So as this goldrush continues and accelerates over the coming months its clear that we are all going to be affected by AI but should we care?
Does it matter whether AI was used to source a brilliant candidate for a job or whether it was an older less “sexy” search algorithm? Does it matter to the consumer if a company uses AI in their processes? Why highlight the use of AI if you’re an energy company – do you customers care? Sometimes we’re guilty of highlighting the technology over the actual business problem it solves.
It will be very interesting to see how the POCs and sandbox use cases of AI evolve over the coming weeks and months, are the transformational use cases emerging and if so what impact will they have. If the speed and evolution of ChatGPT is anything to go by, it won’t be long!
And if the charlatans continue as they inevitably will, it’ll be a matter of time before they’re found out – just like BuilderAI!
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