"AI-first" is the new Return To Office

Summary

The latest fad amongst tech CEOs is no longer "founder mode", or taking drugs that they would fire you for taking, or telling everybody to return to the office — it's demanding that all work be AI-first! This is a great idea if you think nobody at your company is great at what they do. It may otherwise be a suboptimal strategy. Let's dive in! Let's use me as a case study. I'm pretty okay at writing. For example, one time I wrote a fairly technical analysis of Twitter's platform strategy that inspired Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas to start Twitter beef with me two years later when he read the post and took offense to my referring to him as "nobody’s favorite rapper". This is something your GPTs cannot do, I assure you. An average LLM won't even know that Drake's favorite MIME type is application/pdf. Chalk one up for the greatness of human creativity. The AI-First Mind Virus Shopify's CEO Tobi Lütke (personal motto: "what if a Canadian was all the worst things about the United States?") started the "AI-first" trend, with one of those big memos that included, amongst other things, the declaration that "We will add Al usage questions to our performance and peer review questionnaire." This is unusual — did your boss ever have to send you a memo demanding that you use a smartphone? Was there a performance review requiring you to use Slack? I'm actually old enough that I was at different workplaces when they started using spreadsheets and email and the web, and I can tell you, they absolutely didn't have to drive adoption by making people fill out paperwork about how they were definitely using the cool new technology. Isn't that interesting? Some of the other CEOs talking about the use of AI are a little more reasonable. Duolingo's CEO Luis von Ahn seems to be trying to be somewhat more moderate in his memo, stating plainly that he doesn't see AI replacing his employees. (Though that does immediately raise the "who brought that up?" question...) Yet even in this more e...