Reinventing The Wheel Is For The Machines

"AI is not all that it's cracked up to be!",  and you can go search for as many articles as you like expressing such a view.

As I sit here listening to a work conversation it strikes me that LLMs, especially generative LLMs ('AI' from now on) are gonna take a lot of 'work' from knowledge workers.

Reinventing the wheel is, I suspect, what a LOT of people are doing in office pods around the world.

It's rare, very rare, to experience a problem that has not been encountered, discussed, resolved, and published about.

This is why code ("programming") is such a rich area for 'AI', almost everything that needs resolving has been by someone and is on open places such as GitHub. Your particular coding opportunity might be unique when seen as a whole but the individual components are likely already out there just waiting to be put together in your novel way.

This applies to your policy, your work programme, your leadership challenge, anything that you think is new is likely only new to you.

When I started working with cloud technologies, "Enterprise 2.0", everyone's own specific email set-up was managed and lovingly cared for by a team of techies. The logic we approached such organisations when selling Gmail was, "No business is special because of its email system, unless you're in the business of selling email systems." It's blindingly obvious now, it felt weird to many back then.

The typical reaction from those that were handcrafting their organisation email system was,  "But if this is done by someone else, what will I do?" A minority lead the way though, exclaiming, "Oh thank f*#k for that, I can stop doing that and get on with this other stuff that makes an actual difference."

Fear of being dispensable, no longer the tech wizard, losing status amongst peers can drive a lot of behaviour, some defensive some aggressive, all ultimately resolved during the change.

Note: the fear is not about the tech, it's about paying the mortgage, personal status, and even self worth ... don't stomp all over those feelings, they're more important than anything else.

So, back to reinventing the wheel and your work programme, or your project plan, or your membership levels, or your policy, 'AI' is going to bring up the same feelings for you. What you're doing isn't that special, all that brain energy you're putting into it is repeating what someone else has already done, and the machines know the answers.

I know, you are a Project Manager, but if the AI machines do that, what will you do?

You have two options, fight it or sit back in your chair, let out a big breathe, smile and say:

Oh thank f*#k for that, I can stop doing that and get on with this other stuff that makes an actual difference.