Author

Chris Dunlop

Rust.

That annoying orange-brown stuff that forms on metal when it's exposed to air and water. It's a natural process, and it's inevitable.

What has this got to do with your business?

Whether you like it or not, your steel beams are exposed, and we've just been hit with a huge storm. Hurricane Arty has just blown through.

Arty is AI.

What the heck am I talking about?

Let's put a graph in here.

Knowledge has a half-life.

I use the word "knowledge" here to mean efficiencies, processes, and systems that you have in place.

Just think, Xerox used to have a 100% market share in the 1970s with their photocopiers. They had a system that worked. In 1961 alone they earned the equivalent of $630 million in revenue.

Now you just hit Control + C and Control + V.

That's rust in action.

So back to the above graph, for the sake of argument, let's say that since the rise of the internet, there has been a steady rate at which knowledge has been decaying.

What that means is that if you were to do nothing, your knowledge would be worth less and less each year. Eventually reaching a point where it's worthless.

This graph is intuitive, imagine as a Civil Engineer if you were still operating with only the knowledge and systems you had in the year 2000.

You wouldn't be using CAD sofware, you'd be operating Windows 2000, and you'd be using a Nokia 3310.

You would be slower, less efficient, and less competitive. Sure you might be adorable with your Nokia 3310, but you'd be out of business.

The Impact of AI

So let's visualise this rusting process with the introduction of AI.

What are the implications?

Number 1: Your knowledge decay has increased

If you sit on your hands and do nothing, you will find that your knowledge and systemic advantages you have over your customers will decrease.

If you are not using AI, you are the equivalent of a company in 2000 that decides to not use the internet.

You don't have time to have a multi year AI strategy, you need to start today.

Number 2: The Largest Companies in the world are doubling down on AI, stop wasting time with committees

Look at the most recent news

The average company I talk to on a call has an AI committee, where they meet once a month to discuss AI.

This is not going to cut it. How refreshing it would be to hear a CEO say to me, "We are doubling down on AI, we are going to be the best in the world at it."

Instead, businesses are taking a softly softly approach, and they are going to be left behind.

Number 3: Iterate today, don't wait for the perfect solution

Look if you haven't got any AI in your business that's fine. Don't overthink it, start with a small proof of concept, get some runs on the board and iterate from there.

AI doesn't have to be this huge project that takes years to implement.

In fact we encourage businesses that we work with to start small and work backwards, time boxing one month and then seeing what sort of runs you can get on the board in that timeframe.

The Rust has set in

The reason I have wanted to use the rust analogy in this article is that I think that AI presents a false sense of security to many businesses.

Businesses think that they can wait, that AI is purely an optimisation tool and that they can behave in a manner that they have done for the last 10 years.

They don't see that this is a fundamental shift in the way that business is done.

The rust metaphor is to show you that actually it is a forcing function that requires some sort of response.