It’s interesting. On the one hand you’re clearly right.
On the other hand though, with hindsight, imagine the board member saying the same thing about the PC, the internet, mobile computing, cloud computing…
I think both of you are right and it’s only a matter of timing. Time will tell.
probably more than 95% of early internet projects failed, it took like a decade before people really started to have intuitions about what it was good for.
It’s easy to imagine that we’re going to make the AI analog of paypal or amazon, but the vast majority of people flailed at doing anything useful with the web until patterns had been established
> imagine the board member saying the same thing about the PC, the internet, mobile computing, cloud computing…
For the deployment of the PC, I think the vast majority of companies start from an environment where there were already terminal systems or shared workstations available, and the adoption of PCs happened as they became powerful enough to accomplish the tasks that were already being done on the larger computers. It wasn't really a "thou must use PCs, though I know not how they are useful" mandate.
A better example of such a mandate can be found in education, and most of my personal experience with such thou-must-use-technology mandates has been that they've been similarly ineffective as the AI mandate.
Oh, I agree, I'm not saying "AI will always be garbage" but I WOULD say, "yep, mobile computing just isn't ready yet" in 1996. I also said every single day for the past 25 years that "cloud computing is a tool, not a solution." With how many gigs I've had moving workloads back on prem to reduce costs because someone else did a bad lift-and-shift, I think I'm right in tempering excitement. It's just hard to do. Everyone wants new and shiny.
On the other hand, imagine them saying the same thing about blockchain (lots did; there was a lot of "we have been reliably informed this 'block chain' thing is magic; pls use it for something"), or expert systems, or palmpilots, or Minitel, or Segways, or...
On the other hand though, with hindsight, imagine the board member saying the same thing about the PC, the internet, mobile computing, cloud computing…
I think both of you are right and it’s only a matter of timing. Time will tell.