AI Assistants are Now Organizational Accelerants
Anyone following the enterprise AI space cannot help but notice the recent shift in marketing AI tools from targeting individuals (code assistants, GPT chatbots, image generators) to targeting teams (Team Copilot, Google Workspaces, Atlassian Confluence). The keywords “team” and “collaborate” could be heard on nearly every keynote stage in recent months, and this is significant. Tech companies are doubling down on positioning AI as an instrument for accelerating business. Enterprise generative AI, we are told, will revolutionize the ways that companies operate. But what does this evolution bode for individual contributors, and developers specifically? Some imagine a Kafkaesque nightmare in which AI note takers summarize AI-written emails, and in the process generate a mountain of text that no one ever reads. Others worry that by integrating AI into every node of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) AI code assistants will start QAing code written by AI code assistants in systems architected by AI. Garbage in; garbage out. But despite these fears the tech companies selling AI services are bullish about AI’s potential for augmenting organizational velocity, efficiency, and productivity.
The goal of using AI to support and accelerate business is longstanding. Salesforce touted authoring internal communications as one of Einstein’s earliest use cases. But so far this has largely been aspirational. All the air in the room has been taken up with how AI can enable individuals. AI code assistants like GitHub Copilot and AWS Code Whisperer support single developers, namely during their focused coding time. Similarly, personal ChatGPT accounts allow individuals to generate responses as unique as themselves—from vegan taco recipes to wedding vows. All of these distinct and private uses elevate the human by giving them super powers. Tasks that previously took hours, such as writing thank you notes or persuasive emails to your landlord, could now be accomplished quickly and (relatively) eloquently.
