The long nose

We all know how simple organisational change is to execute, right? It's simple stuff. Tell people what they need to do in a clear and concise fashion, and then they will take on board the new ways of working and adopt them quickly.

And... back in the room.

There's an odd thing going on at the moment. Boosters and pessimists claim we are on the precipice of unimaginable change. Artificial Intelligence is about to change the world.

And yet all is not as it seems.

I think we are witnessing two "long noses".

The first is nearly at the end. It's the long nose of the development of artificial intelligence technologies that have had a growth phase in the last decade, and particularly in the last few years, but have been in gestation for decades. They've been creeping in without us really noticing (Google Translate, for example. Or Grammarly. Or tools like Shazam.)

But more recently we have seen a spectacular increase in marketing of these tools to herald the arrival of ChatGPT and Midjourney and Bard. Tools that do the impossible. Or at least do things that we thought were impossible to do with computers until it was realised that if you chuck enough computing power at a problem then computers can do them.

Impressive tools, undoubtedly. But so was Excel when it came along.

Here begins the second long nose—the long nose of adoption. Real adoption.

The comparison with Excel is informative. Whilst most office workers probably can find their way around the spreadsheet tool, there are few "power" users with most either using it as determined by others through corporate templates and proforma, as a very rudimentary database, or as a place for occasional calculation.

However, Excel's strength is the autonomy and agency it gives to its users. It's the tool by which all the cracks within corporate systems are filled, and many gaps are bridged with it, too. Much, often, to the chagrin of the IT department, who can't figure out why people won't just use the tools that have been mandated for managing money, customers, parts, tools, people...

Generative tools can become the knowledge worker Polyfilla of the 21st Century. That stickiness is gold dust for software manufacturers. No organisation could credibly remove spreadsheets from its software estate because spreadsheets are where so much of the "real" work happens.

Is that good for software organisations? For sure. Lock in and the opportunity to drive revenue because of the huge compute resources that many of these tools demand (it's all about selling compute these days my friends) is a wonderful thing.

Is that good for the customers? Hmm.

Has Excel been good for organisations?

My hunch is that the answer is "Probably".

But we are at the beginning of the long nose of adoption. Because, as I noted up front, this sort of change takes time. And it will happen at different rates for different people in different organisations. Many people do a lot of things very manually in Excel, five decades since spreadsheet tools first appeared in our businesses.

As with all technology hypes, expectations in the short term are being massively overhyped, but the really interesting stuff will happen in the long term.

In 2007 the iPhone was introduced. By 2010 the world hadn't changed much. By 2024 it's shifted dramatically. But not everyone has shifted at the same pace. I imagine we'll see a similar path with generative AI.