A good idea on steroids quickly becomes a terrible idea.
Morgan Housel shared – Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz wrote to senior management in 2007: “In order to go from less than 1,000 stores to 13,000 stores we have had to make a series of decisions, that, in retrospect, have led to the watering down of the Starbucks experience.” Starbucks closed six hundred stores in 2008 and laid off twelve thousand employees. Its stock fell 73 percent, which was dreadful even by 2008 standards.
Schultz wrote in his 2011 book Onward: “Growth, we now know all too well, is not a strategy. It is a tactic. And when undisciplined growth became a strategy, we lost our way.”
I think something similar is happening with AI, we started with LLMs such as Open AI’s ChatGPT. Google Bard(now called Gemini) followed soon. We now have Open AI’s Sora which can generate great quality videos with text prompts. These are powerful tools and have some valid use cases, but, many organizations are rushing to fit their use cases with the capability of tools rather than the real business benefits. As I wrote in my earlier blog ‘Generative AI – is your organization ready?’, organizations need to first focus on being AI ready with AI ready security, AI ready data and AI ready principles and think about the readiness to be compliant of the upcoming AI regulations such as ‘EU AI act’.
Thinking Space 