An internal AI expert for Dev & Ops

We've all had that problem where there's too few technical experts to answer everyone's questions. And if you ask a public AI a technical question, you have to avoid using company proprietary code and data, so you generalize the question and get a not-so-helpful answer. Same thing happens if you Google it, or ask on public Stack Overflow... modified general question gets less than ideal responses.

So then we started creating internal wiki's and setting up various discussion boards or (worse) ticketing systems to get answers. You could share the real questions internally with proprietary code and data, but the experience wasn't as good as Stack Overflow or AI, and people would typically default to chatting online with their nearest internal technical expert, get the answer, and it's lost... the next person will ping the same expert in some ad hoc way and they'll answer again... assuming they're available and they haven't left the company.

Obviously, AI could theoretically fill this gap, but you need it to be secure and internal, and it needs access to those conversations. The solution: get all your technical folks (Dev, Ops, Professional Services, Customer Service, and anyone else) to start having those tech Q&A conversations "in the open" (but internally) in a tool designed to categorize and store that conversational data in topics or channels (e.g. private Stack Overflow)... and then put AI on top of that.

As it turns out, Stack Overflow just announced they've done just that, with their new OverflowAI. If you're not using a private instance of Stack Overflow (they call it Stack Overflow for Teams), you're missing out. The power of having your Developers and your Operations folks asking each other questions in a familiar, powerful platform that encourages and rewards participation is beneficial enough, but with AI on top of it, it just got amazing. The AI will answer questions with internal expert citations. All your expert chit chat instantly made available for everyone, everywhere, any time.

Fun Story: I was at a Pluralsight conference in 2022 and happened to meet Prashanth Chandrasekar , the CEO of Stack Overflow, at dinner one evening.? He asked if I had any feedback on their product.? I thought it would be great to ask my teams for their input, but everyone around the globe was already done for the day... except for New Zealand who was just starting!? I quickly hopped on our most recent town hall chat for that team, and we had a spontaneous virtual Q&A with Prashanth right then and there via my iPhone... we all had a lot of fun with it.? Prashanth's approachability and love for the product are something I'll never forget.

P.S.? It will be interesting to see if Glue, the new AI-powered work chat by David O. Sacks (to compete with Slack and Teams) is useful in this context.? However, I still expect the well established dev-focused Stack Overflow to work best in this use case. You just can't be Stack for any technical question that starts with "How do I...?"