AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making

Nikhil Suresh https://hermit-tech.com/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decisionmaking

“Unfortunately, we live in a dark timeline. All of the AI projects we have observed as a team are failing. Every single one – we have seen 0% success in a year and a half, not only amongst projects we have been asked to participate in22 We have rejected all AI implementation work. It is absolutely a gigantic bubble and we have minimized our exposure to it – every single one of our current contracts would be totally unaffected by OpenAI collapsing, save for perhaps some second-order effects such a recession causing a client to become unable to pay us. And there’s nothing we can do to insulate ourselves from that anyway., but even within projects that we have observed in passing while doing totally unrelated work. Even if you grant that AI tooling accelerates specific workloads, the method and scale of the current investments is senseless. Frequently the failure is not related to AI itself, but rather that companies are terminally bad at running software projects effectively, and as I have remarked previously, AI projects are subject to all the failure modes of normal projects plus you can get everything right and then still fail because of the method’s novelty. Very few companies are so good at shipping software that they can afford the extra risk profile.”

Early in my IT career I had the good fortune to work with one of the most senior and experienced technical leaders in my company. It was one of those times when I learned by listening and doing rather than by directly being taught. The project was to create the processes and assessments for enabling our team to achieve Level 5 of the SEI’s Capability Maturity Model (SEI CMM). The goal of CMM was to improve the industry wide inefficiencies with software development projects.

A fool with a tool is still a fool – Joe Oliphant, EDS Consultant Systems Engineer

CMM attempted to achieve this goal by institutionalizing processes in such a way that employees would always know what to do and would not necessarily conceive of doing them in any other way. The processes are enabled by tools, and industry wide there was emphasis on the selling and buying of these tools. It was not surprising there was such an emphasis on tools because in many ways CMM came about during the time when code generation was seen as the path for increasing productivity.

Looking back I view any successes of CMM as more to do with marketing than any real change. While potential customers required their IT providers have SEI CMM certification, IT projects continued to be over budget and not on time. CMM eventually faded in to the background thanks in part to the emergence of Agile.

In my opinion failure of IT projects is caused by not recognizing that application development is more of an art than a science, and thus individual experience is not valued. Doing IT very well is hard, takes time, and requires smart, experienced people. The chronic condition of the IT industry is that it’s corporate leaders always, always, want to take shortcuts that lead to quick pay outs. (See Simon Sinek talk about The Infinite Game)

It is not surprising to me that an industry that thinks throwing hundreds, if not thousands, of low cost and inexperienced people at problems is a path to a success is now jumping at yet another tool, called AI, that it thinks is going to save the day. The industry never needed a maturity model for software developers, instead it has always and still does need a CEO Maturity Model.