Someone I know said it's because investors get excited to know your product has AI.
[dead]
Ask HN: Why is every company encorporating AI everywhere?
41–49 of 49 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is every company encorporating AI everywhere?
#42It boils down to this: Nobody is willing to bet against AI right now.
If you're an investor, you're probably managing other people's money. Would you want to explain to your customers if & when you were wrong, why you didn't go all in on AI? This is the most transformative technology humanity has ever conceived and we've been making sci fi movies about for decades, and didn't put all our money into it?
So now that investor money is too scared to go anywhere else, that means if you're a CEO who cares about your share price, and who has to front up to the board every few weeks and defend your strategy lest they fire you, you must care about AI too. We aren't just a stiff old database anymore, noooo sir, we are the context layer for agents.
So now, if you're the CTO, are you going to tell the CEO that AI has no use case here? Not if you care about your job. Repeat, all the way down to the bottom.
There will be an emperor has no clothes moment. It might not be as dramatic as everyone is hoping, and it doesn't mean AI isn't world changing and is not here to stay, but the survival-induced psychosis at every level of the corporate world is absolutely unsustainable.
Re: Ask HN: Why is every company encorporating AI everywhere?
#43[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: Why is every company encorporating AI everywhere?
#44No, certainly not necessary in all cases. It's a marketing approach: companies want to find an edge and a way to indicate they're progressing and leading, so they find a way to attach AI to whatever they do. Only a fraction of these are worthwhile, and in most cases users would be better off by using their own AI directly.
Re: Ask HN: Why is every company encorporating AI everywhere?
#45[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: Why is every company encorporating AI everywhere?
#46[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Why is every company encorporating AI everywhere?
#47I consult on the topic of technology for non-technology companies (think like a hydraulic piston manufacturer or something. They consume software in order to create something else.) Basically if the technical leaders at such companies fail to shoehorn AI in somewhere, they will have to find a way to demonstrate to their board of directors that they are keeping up to date and not allowing the business to settle in to…
There's a lot to your point. Tech companies with barely functioning enterprise software products (or worse, companies that can acquire other companies and their enterprise products) can burn the bridge to the past by de-investing in legacy maintenance (laying off staff and expertise, cutting support), and forcing the existing user base to accept AI-fueled reboots. Buyers are sent back to market and the choice is between Behemoth Who's All in on AI's Latest VaporWareAI or Legacy Software that Works But Is a Sitting Duck.
It's an industry-wide excuse/opportunity to force what was a stagnant commodity enterprise software market back into a new buying cycle with enough face-saving modernization chrome that buyers can make spending justifications.
At best, this will be a de-evolutionary enshittification local minima era followed by a slow rebuild. More likely, the enshittification era will collapse under its own hyperinflated weight when the logrolling bubble pops, and there will be a consolidation of incremental gains, with a few new benefits being added to what would otherwise look on a long term scale as typical linear innovation if it were not for the hype bubble.
Re: Ask HN: Why is every company encorporating AI everywhere?
#48[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Why is every company encorporating AI everywhere?
#49It boils down to this: Nobody is willing to bet against AI right now. If you're an investor, you're probably managing other people's money. Would you want to explain to your customers if & when you were wrong, why you didn't go all in on AI? This is the most transformative technology humanity has ever conceived and we've been making sci fi movies about for decades, and didn't put all our money into it? So now that in…
The thing is it doesn’t even matter if you are wrong because everyone is doing the same thing
No one will blame you for going all in on AI