Be Wary of Jumping on the "AI First" Bandwagon

That wagon could be heading for a crash in Commodified Creek. I think too many companies will end up with mediocre products and services with some AI queries glued on.

Instead, it's more important to apply AI with Strategic Simplicity®. Identify 80/20 points (small, critical turning points in your processes / customer journeys) and bottlenecks that can give the best ROI from AI. Then choose to start with the ones that are low-hanging fruit so you build up your AI skills.

#AI

#strategy

#digitaltransformation

#businesstransformation

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Efficiency Doesn't Have To Mean Layoffs

Today, many companies (especially tech organizations) are touting their efficiencies and their reduced head counts.  Increased efficiency (whether or not from AI) is great, but reduced head counts are not the only way to monetize it.  That is the static approach.

The dynamic approach is to focus on growth to utilize your spare capacity of workers.  So, if you previously needed 200 employees to serve your current customer base, and AI now lets you do it with 100,  you can focus on doubling your customer base and not laying anyone off!

Realistically, it will probably end up being a combination of staff reduction and growth, but right now the news is just filled with talk of layoffs.  

But layoffs are defensive.  Now is the time for offense!  With employees freed up, and AI now reducing costs, now it's time to go after new markets, such as customer segments that could not afford your product.  If you previously served the upper mid-sized companies and large corporations, now you should be able to introduce products for lower mid-size and smaller businesses.

The dynamic 

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Don't Call It Vibe Coding

I enjoy working with AI.  Even though I'm strategist,  I still need (and want) to understand how coding with AI works, and it makes my job easier.

For example, I have a recurring issue where my client needs to extract information from different systems. It means generating scripts to scrape webpages.  Instead of writing the scripts by hand, it would be nice to have an AI generate the scripts.  My client's problem is that the quantity of data makes it hard to upload it to an AI.  They need so many scripts generated.

So, in the shower, I got the idea to get AI to write a tool which can take html files, plus flexible queries, and generate the scripts.  Almost an "AI lite."

I worked with Grok for a couple of hours, iterated through some attempts, and got what I wanted.  Also, I was using the free versions!  

I hear people complaining that AI can't generate code but, in my case, with 30+ years of experience, I have experience coached less experienced programmers.  I treat AI just like a jr programmer.  I tighten my descriptions, create examples, rephrase, etc.

This is not "chill out vibe coding."  This is analysis and design thinking.  Responding to feedback.  This is the skill that will keep people employed.  You need to be able to understand both the problem and what the AI thinks the problem is.  You have to spot the miscommunication.  It's analogous to working with third party vendors or remote teams.  

This is the "language simplicity" component of my Strategic Simplicity® Framework (CLOUD) for digital transformation and project management success and productivity.

#vibecoding

#Grok

#AI

© 2025 Praveen Puri

AI Is a Tool, We Still Need Humans to Think and Imagine

Someone asked me if AI, if it was around in the 1990's, could have advised Sears to take on Amazon.

I replied that Sears should not have had to "take on" Amazon.  They should have been Amazon.  

They were Amazon in the late 19th / early centuries.  They took advantage of the high tech at the time (railroads) to deliver their catalogs and products all over America.  They let people in small towns shop remotely and have a much greater choice.

But, in the 80s/80s, they got distracted by trying to play in finance and insurance, and they lacked a visionary/critical thinker who could see the analogy between the internet and the railroad.

An AI would not have caught this.  That is why humans need to be the leaders.  Human's strengths (critical thinking, imagination, and communication/story telling) will be ever more important.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

How to Delay Projects

As a manager, If you want to delay your projects and reduce throughput, make sure that each of your employees is at "maximum utilization", and loaded with work.

The counter-intuitive fact is, if you want to maximize output, you shouldn't load people more than 75%.

The truth is that project execution is like driving on a highway. If the highway is filled to capacity, you have traffic jams. At 75% capacity, cars have the bandwidth to maneuver around stalled cars, sudden braking, etc.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

My Analysis of Zuckerberg's "Personal Superintelligent" AI Manifesto

Zuckerberg is ambitious and follows Andy Grove's idea of "only the paranoid survive" and wants to stay ahead of disruption.  AI models are in danger of becoming commodities—users can build their applications and, through the cloud, easily switch between models.

So, to differentiate, he is leveraging the fact that Facebook is minting money (they exceeded this quarter by a lot), by throwing it at the best researchers, and is promoting this idea of "personalized super intelligence."

All the AI players are starting to think about the model being a commodity, and so Meta is not the only one trying to escape from being behind a phone or PC.  While Meta is talking about AI glasses, OpenAI made the big teaser announcement that they partnered with Jony Ives (the famous Apple designer) to create their own wearable AI device (rumored to be a pendant).

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Zuckerberg's Manifesto

If you've been following AI news, Meta has been putting together a "AI super intelligence" team, and they have been hiring away the best scientists from Open AI, Google, etc. for professional athlete money ($100+ million).

Today, Zuckerberg released his manifesto (https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/).

The highlights are:

1. They have seen AI start to improve itself in the last few months, so developing super intelligence is within sight.

2. The rest of this decade will likely be decisive for determining the path forward.

3. He believes the other companies subscribe to the model of a central AI super intelligence taking all jobs and people living on the dole of it's output.

4. Meta's vision is personalized super intelligence in everyone's hands, for people to achieve their visions.

5. He feels our primary computing devices will be something like glasses that see and hear everything we do, and interact with us during the day.

© 2025 Praveen Puri