"You are largely going to have to do the R&D yourself"

Nobody has special information about how to best use AI at your company, or a playbook for how to integrate it into your organization.

Ethan Mollick, in response to Shopify’s CEO calling for all employees to start using AI, emphasizes that consultants and enterprise software vendors will not be swooping in to save the day (just yet):

…experimentation is hard and expensive for outsiders trying to develop new products, but very cheap for workers doing their own tasks. As users are very motivated to make their own jobs easier with technology, they find ways to do so. The user advantage is especially big in experimenting with Generative AI because the systems are unreliable and have a jagged frontier of capability. Experts can easily assess when an AI is useful for their work through trial and error, but an outsider often cannot.

He goes on to discuss barriers to individual innovation spreading due to misaligned incentives.

I appreciate his concern for people worrying about their jobs. When the web exploded in the late 90s it felt like a new frontier of possibility. It was as transformative as promised — that story continues — but fundamentally didn’t feel like a replacement or threat.

The last generation of machine learning transformed the demand side — algorithmic feeds upended how we consume media, and by extension, make sense of the world. This generation, generative AI, will transform the supply side — we’ll get an order of magnitude more people producing content, and they will produce an order of magnitude more content each.