My former colleague C is consulting clients on GenAI use cases these days and as hot as the market is, she is quite frustrated. C has been postponing retirement because she would die of boredom plus she is still sharp as a tack. She says most customers she talks to want to find a problem whose solution is GenAI. They driven by the sheer terror of missing out. They don't like it when C asks them what problems do they have that need to be solved GenAI or not. That is too old school now - the answer to all problems is one.
I seem to recall it was the same thing with blockchain back in the day - if you were in an IT leadership role, you simply had to have a point of view on blockchain and some use cases primed up for funding. All that fell to the way side over time - just about no one could come up with a problem whose one and only right solution was blockchain.
I see history repeating itself - it is as if the thing that must be done or the house will be on fire. C mentioned that one CEO she spoke to recently had issued a directive to all his directs to cascade down to the lowest levels of the food-chain, to provide a summary of their GenAI plans.
So every last employee was now tasked with coming up with problems that GenAI could solve. Presumably from the hivemind would emerge winning ideas to build and sell. Last time I met C almost a year ago, she was talking about how she did not want to get bored at work - there is a certain monotony with selling despite all the variety of deals. I bet that is problem she no longer has with having to update her GenAI first call deck every few days - in a month the entire thing is obsolete.
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