A New Horizon

For some time now, I've held regular meetings with a colleague from a department within the product area, where we discuss technology-related topics. We began with the aim of helping him better understand our systems and find ways to improve the workflow in his department. After a few months without connecting during the summer period, he asked me when we reconnected: "Are you using AI for anything interesting?"

The question made me pause and reflect. Undeniably, I am using AI, but am I using it in an interesting way?

After thinking for a moment, I confessed that what I’m actually doing is adapting AI tools to things I was already doing. As assistants, I use LLMs with which I hold conversations that help me reflect; I create prompts to summarize very long conversations or to extract action items; voice-to-text transcriptions in meetings aid note-taking; and agents embedded in various parts of the system help the team catch errors earlier. I also make fun images to support my messages, create prototypes, or simply for entertainment. But there is nothing truly innovative or groundbreaking in any of this; the way I utilize these new tools merely serves to assist me in what I was doing before.

My intuition is that we are looking at something new and unknown with curious eyes, trying to figure out how it works and what we can truly do with it. The truth is, we don't know yet, because it's possible that we can do things we are not yet capable of conceiving. Much like a time traveler from the early 20th century would look around, perplexed, seeing people walking and talking into small boxes, sitting in extraordinarily expensive cafes with strange typing machines, or driving vehicles back and forth in a frantic activity. In ten years, our world may have changed in a way we simply cannot imagine.

It will undoubtedly be worth watching.

exit(0);