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Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?

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Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?

#1
I'm the lead software engineer at a company building a B2B hardware/software product in the US. Great team, great technology, great PMF and good progress on revenue targets. There are lots of opportunities for how to develop the product further. It's been an extremely hard scale-up but we are finally starting to see it pay off.

I'm struggling with the CEO being increasingly focussed on investing heavily in AI. I'm not opposed to using this tech at all – it's amazing, and we incorporate a variety of different ML models across our stack where they are useful. But this strategy has evolved to the point where we are limiting resource on key teams aligned with core business to invest in an AI team.

The argument seems to be that they've realized the only way to achieve the next round of funding is to be "AI-first". There is no product roadmap for what this looks like, or what features might be involved, or why we'd want to do it from a product point of view. Instead the reason is that this is the only way to attract a big series C round.

I'm not well-informed enough to know if this is the correct approach to scaling. Instead of working on useful, in-demand product features, it feels like we're spending a lot of time looking at a distant future that we'll struggle to reach if we take our eye off of the ball. Is this normal? Are other organizations going through the same struggle? For the first time in five years I feel completely out of my depth.

Re: Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?

#2
Work with them on a product roadmap?

I've seen folks wanting big changes and we sit down and draw things up and surprisingly it looks like the old roadmap. Everyone is happy and I don't say anything about the similarities, and most importantly we're on the same page ;)

Sometimes when leadership asks for big changes, even when they say big changes, you might find if you get into the details it's not THAT big a change.

In the meantime don't let your mind run too wild assuming and worrying about what they might be asking for. I do that too, it's a developer thing I think, we start considering possibilities or even misused terminology and we get into a loop ;)

Re: Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?

#6
Bear in mind there is not always a strong relation between "what will improve the product", "what will attract customers", and "what will attract funding". A big part of the CEO job is to manage all of those at once.

As the engineer you need to support all three, while being the voice of realism (internally). But don't get confused when they conflict -- they always conflict to some degree.

Re: Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?

#7
Keep in mind that your company is the product. And the customers are Wall Street.

Your product is not really the product. So the only thing that really matters is how your company is perceived to those who could potentially buy it and give your C-suite an exit.

Re: Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?

#8
If you trust the CEO's leadership, work hard. The CEO has to worry about runway, not engineers.

If not, I'd say make a data-backed case for another course of action, or find another job.

Most CEOs I've worked with would be open to hearing a well-reasoned argument for another course of action.

Also presenting a good case can be a nice career move even if it's not adopted.

Re: Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?

#9
Draw up the product roadmap such that you can claim maximum AI-ness while including as little of it as possible in the actual product. Sounds like the CEO doesn't have any technical objections to not using AI, he just wants the ability to raise on AI branding.

Include as much non-AI work as you can in the AI teams' projects, pitch an "AI efficiency initiative" that minimizes new spend on AI with the justification of other teams picking up the slack, talk up whatever ML you're already doing, etc.

Re: Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?

#10
It seems like it's worth taking some time to steel-man the AI argument, even if your CEO hasn't made it very well.

E.g. If you don't work on AI now, and AI models keep improving, how likely is it that a competitor who integrates AI well will eat your lunch? If it's >50%, it seems worth it to shift some focus to AI regardless of the series C round.

This post from a few days ago has some great tips on how to integrate AI _well_: https://koomen.dev/essays/horseless-carriages/

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