AI Is Strategy. What About Your Culture?

Throughout my career as a software developer I have observed the very human tendency to pin hopes on technical solutions in order to improve the effectiveness of people. I’m guilty too, perhaps more than most. But I think the causality goes the other way around.

AI is the object of hope du jour - and for good reason, it’s a powerful tool. Those of us on the engineering side are trying to figure out how to skillfully aim this new cannon and there is a learning curve, as with every major technology shift before it. However, because LLMs have such a tractable and easy on-ramp I think a lot of teams risk papering over deeper issues with brute force token usage.

For those of us building products in the B2B space, there is always this temptation to build a one-off customization to make a customer happy (happy customers == we keep our jobs). And sometimes you have to work through a few concrete instances of a problem before you understand the abstraction - the real product that lies within the customizations. But if you are spending, say, 20% of your time as a team tweaking configurations and content for customers you don’t need AI you need more product thinking and an appropriate level of focus on customer self-service.

Teams who are effectively using AI don’t lean on it to avoid the hard work of product development. They make opinionated software that is closed for modification but open to extension - software that cohesively models a specific problem space ergonomically but allows for new functionality to be added in a clean-ish way. For the cases where customization is truly required and factored into long-term profitability, AI is a heck of a handy tool.

I think the characteristics of the team drive process and technology adoption not the other way around (although there is a clear feedback loop within good and bad systems): curiosity, agency, ownership, mastery, and ruthless efficiency. The fixation on replacing people with AI feels a little backwards to me, because AI is downstream of culture - what people create and cultivate. Peter Drucker’s wisdom that “culture eats strategy for breakfast” is as true now as it ever was.