9 comments

  • JohnMakin 4 hours ago

    > For ongoing projects, an effective trick that I believe I picked up from Secrets of Consulting is the anonymous poll, where you can ask individuals to rate their opinion of an AI project’s success chances on a scale of 1 to 10. The typical split I have observed is half of those involved rating the project at a 3/10 and others at around an 8/10 – a clear bimodal split on a project that was already three years late. Bringing this data to a CEO can be an effective method of pointing out that some information is clearly being hidden from them on the state of the project.

    I don't think this is a very effective method of getting any kind of truth. Just as the people pushing the initiatives up top have incentive to lie about its success, people on the ground have incentive to lie about the opposite - for instance, in my org, we've pretty much just used it to automate tedium, and accelerate processes, and realized pretty quickly there were roles that were almost entirely automatable tedium and managing process - surprise surprise, those people are very negative about how useful AI is.

    The tools are useful, there is no doubt, but the excitement and investment is simply way, way too high. I'm lucky at my org they have taken a more cautious "let's see what happens" approach, and want proof of any claimed successes.

      trescenzi 3 hours ago

      Yea we saw an anonymous question “Are you using AI to be more efficient” start at 30/70 yes/no and flip to 90/10 after a mandate. I know that’s a very different question but it shows that anon questions are still directly influenced by everything else going on. Hopefully a question like the author recommends would be more accurate but I’d still expect a heavy influence based upon management’s stance.

        simoncion 3 hours ago

        Savvy folks know that anonymous surveys that require you to sign in with any account are not anonymous. If a director -say- knows how many people in which groups have and have not filled out the survey, it's very much not anonymous.

  • reactordev 4 hours ago

    How about E) All of the above?

    Every executive team is under AI hypnosis.

  • ghthor 4 hours ago

    We’ve done pretty basic stuff like expose a bunch of data sources over MCP and our nontechnical employees are now able to answer questions and build interactive data visualizations they would never have been able to do before.

    I think this article is way too negative and I would question the authors bias; I don’t think it’s hard to see how valuable these tools are.

      wrs 3 hours ago

      Are these answers and visualizations accurate? How accurate? How do you know?

      moron4hire 3 hours ago

      There's always an executive asking for another dashboard.

        simoncion 3 hours ago

        ...another dashboard that they look at -at most- once, no less.

  • daveguy 4 hours ago

    Well, it didn't take long for this post to be disappeared from the front page.

    Edit: ahhh, I see why. In the list of ways to keep your sanity through the AI mania -- "I no longer visit Hackernews, Reddit, or really anywhere where I am going to be drip-fed nonsense."