Please stop the AI Confidence Theater
We don’t need an extra reason to be anxious
"AI headlines never disappoint. First, AI was killing education (oh the good ol’ days, I miss thee). Then we moved on to eliminating writers, engineers, designers, product managers, and sales jobs - I believe in that exact order. Marketing, Finance, and HR were spared though, which I find ironic. Google, with its precious SEO, was on the chopping block because of AI. Then we decided to collectively eliminate SaaS. We didn’t, but the stock market believed it and lots of people lost $$$. Now we are in the middle of everyone and their mother needing an AI agent, because you are def missing out on a life changing experience if you don’t have one. And yet… 99% of people don’t even know what an AI agent even does.
Meanwhile, I’m over here asking ChatGPT to rewrite the same paragraph for the third time because it keeps defaulting me into ‘LinkedIn wisdom post’ mode. GARH.
Look: I work at an AI company. I use AI all day. I strategize with it. I build products with it. I write with it. I analyze data with it. But even I feel like everyone else has cracked the AI code while I’m still using some basic tutorial version over here.
So I started asking a simple question whenever someone told me AI had changed their life: ‘Cool. Show me.’
And most of the time I see some basic workflows. Summarizing Slack. Answering emails. Doing scheduled scans. Performing research and booking something. Sending emails out of Claude. Okay…. it’s useful. But show me something that has become so critical in your day that if I took it away tomorrow, your work would actually fall apart. Show me something truly life changing.
Five years ago, people wanted you to think they worked harder than everyone else. Today they want you to think AI does it all.
Five years ago, people shared and bragged about big outcomes: revenue, user milestones, fundraising, headcount. Today people are just highlighting how many tokens they’re burning. Everyone wants you to believe they have an invisible team of AI employees running their business while they think big thoughts. But where are those business outcomes, tho?!?
Five years ago, people bragged about waking up at 5am, doing cold plunges, having inbox zero, and working while endlessly Peletoning. Now it’s all about having 17 agents, not opening email, and AI running your business. It’s the exact same performance, just with different props.
AI is already the coolest tech innovation of our lives… we don’t need to pretend it’s magical too."
Above, I have included some excerpts from this interesting article by Elena Verna (CEO at Lovable, former executive at Dropbox, Amplitude, Netlify, and SurveyMonkey).
Read the full article
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