“AI Native” is not enough

There is no "i" in team. But coincidentally, there are two "i's" in "AI Native".

Sounds fishy, right? As CFOs say "Do more with less", we are left with a hollow feeling.

Engineers built AI that codes. Then leadership used it against them. Now, we increase token budgets at the expense of hiring.

These token budgets are now coming for non-engineer roles as we collapse multiple roles (PM, design, data) into one person (or an agent for the ambitious at heart).

We've actually been here before. At the start of my career, engineers were asked to do all of this. I singlehandedly built dozens of products in the days before the roles of PM, UI/UX and analyst existed.

Now, the difference is that any individual from any discipline can take the lead, not just engineers.

As we use AI to accelerate product development, it's the focus on success, not just launching, that matters.

Being "AI Native" only deals with the how, not the what.

When I operated on my own, I didn't just build these products. I knew the problem I was solving. I made sure the solutions delivered value for the customer and our business.

So as companies strive to be "AI Native", most will focus too much on the AI aspect and not enough on the customer and business value.

Speed is important but our pre-AI problems are still here in a post-AI world.

-- Does anybody want it?
-- Are we shipping to hit deadlines instead of achieving goals?
-- Are our teams innovative enough or just going through the motions?

Every AI presentation I see focuses on speed and simplicity where some mythical agent does all the work. But nowhere do these processes include feedback (neither quant nor qual) from customers.

The key is to take the best of what we've learned and combine it with AI's capabilities. Don't ignore our hard-earned lessons.

This bias towards speed over direction may eventually fix itself but how many tokens ($$$) will you have burned? How many excellent folks will your CFO have laid off in the meantime?