AI is solving the wrong problems

AI should do more of the garbage collection.

AI is solving the wrong problems.

I enjoy Grammarly's suggestions for improving my writing and the weekly email telling me what a great writer I am becoming!

But I wish AI was (or is it ‘were’?) more helpful.

I need less help with creation and more help with maintenance.

?

Clean up the garbage

PowerPoint

I have spent hours cleaning up the PowerPoint master template and presentations.

My product management presentaton has 700+ slides (don't worry; I don't show them all). Merging slides from multiple presentations often results in multiple layers of graphics and text in the master. I found three copies of my copyright notice, one on top of the other; four or five (or six!) copies of various icons and graphics.

And this doesn’t help:

Website

My friends tell me I should spend a few hours every weekend managing SEO.

My website isn’t very complicated. (It’s beautiful, IMHO, but it has fewer than 200 pages). So why am I optimizing the SEO on each page? Ridiculous! AI should scan my entire website, understand my point of view, and update the SEO nonsense for me. People should not (and soon will not) spend time trying to trick Google into front-page placement.

Instead, my website tool has an AI to write bland, generic copy. No thanks.

While we're on the subject of websites, I wish my website tool could tell me what images are NOT used on any pages. I can find missing images; I would like to find orphan images.?

And why did I spend more than a few minutes copying and pasting this article from Word? Because one (or both) of these tools is stupid. I have to remember not to use bullets in the document or else (slowly and manually) remove them from the website and then re-apply them.

It seems to me that I shouldn’t have to work so hard to get around my applications.

Don't treat humans like computers

For my birthday, my family gave me a vinyl record of the Traveling Wilburys, a super-band consisting of Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty. Turns out… I already had it. So I explored available apps for cataloging albums, and—wow!—what a disappointment! The apps expect you to type in the album information... manually. Seriously?

A catalog app should be able to build my catalog from photos of the albums or, better yet, from this photo of the album spines. Isn’t that an ideal use of AI? (If you look closely, you'll see I have quite a few duplicates.)

Solve real problems?

I like getting AI help when writing Javascript and creating formulas in Excel.

I like doing quick AI searches, such as: "What percentage of American adults have not used ChatGPT?" (Answer: As of early 2024, approximately 23% of American adults have used ChatGPT, which means that 77% have not used it yet.)

However, too many companies are creating AI offerings focused on the technology. "We need AI in our product" is not a valid requirement. As with software and data science, they need to stop saying, "If we build it, they will come." Instead, it's time to return to the product management mantra:

Products solve problems for personas.

Think of the things that waste our time and prevent us from doing more productive work. That's where we need help.

Humans are good at judgment and creative tasks. AI is good at handling vast amounts of data and performing repetitive tasks.

I don’t need AI to create—I’ll do that; I need AI to take out the garbage.