RE: INVENT & RE: DISTILL

AI. AI. AI.

AI will eat our jobs!

AI will wipe the profits!

AI will change how we see things!

AI will do many things but will not wipe out humanity.

I attended a concert with Bogdan Mihai Simion this week (mid-April 2024). He is one of the most spectacular presences in the entertainment space of Romania. In his 30s, holding a PhD in literature, he created a very special band ("Lautarii de matase"), bringing together great instrumentists in their 60s, able to recreate the sounds from 1900 or 1800. Bogdan himself is playing cobza, a kind of guitar that is specific to Romanian space, an instrument that is almost lost (about 65 persons are known to play cobza, most of them close to the sunset of their life). The repertoire of the band is made out of very old songs, collected by the band as part of their preparations and reproduced in a fascinating manner, without any electronic inference. Like Eric Clapton used to play in the MTV's session Unplugged. Raw, as Bogdan says about their performance.

So, a band of great instrumentists, in their 60s, led by a creative soloist, with an exquisite education, singing old songs, a combination of tangos, romantic hits and swing from 1920, "old songs" (cantece batranesti) from all regions of Romania, new old songs from 1970-1990, including the early stages of manele. Completely counter-intuitive.

RE:INVENT

During the concert, I got hit by the fact that Bogdan Mihai Simion embraced the threat of modern music, instead of running from it. Most of the new bands or soloists are riding the wave of the trends. Create in the direction of the trends, modify and change a bit of the existing ones to make sure that the bands capture the demand in the market. What the band proposed was to use the old instruments, to focus more on feelings and stories, with a focus on the needs of the humans.

How this could be interesting when managing the transition of IT in the AI era? It can open many possibilities to generate business in the so-called traditional development space. The first and foremost issue to be considered in the upcoming decades is the maintenance of the existing systems. It is not an easy task to maintain old technology stacks next to new implementations and it requires mastering good programming and architecture skills. Secondly, one should not forget that the implementation of the AI models into a working solution requires mundane activities, from unit testing of the modules acting as glue code, moving through maintenance of servers, updates and bugfixes for the running systems and ending with a good understanding of business.

All of these and potentially many more could generate business for the companies in the IT space. The reinvention in this space means to master better the skills necessary for the delivery, as the technology becomes mature and the customers are not willing to pay both for the solutions and the learning efforts. The reinvention should also consider the efficiency in delivery for a certain sector, being this industrial maintenance, automotive, cyber security, healthcare or education. The respective sectors need more depth of specialization to generate digital solutions for the expected transitions.

When looking from another angle at the transition, reinvention means to use effectively the tools from AI to generate faster and better solutions. For instance, today I am writing this article using Grammarly, which corrects my grammar and sometimes suggests better formulations. I used Canva to generate the graphics for the meetups COMM-IT and I used the Co-Pilot for the little pieces of code I need here and there. Definitely, I can be faster and cheaper than 10 years ago.

So, do not fear to generate new ways of working in the old solutions space, creating new blue oceans where you do not have hard competition.

RE: DISTILL

This is a bit more complex. You need a foundation for re-distilling the concepts. Bogdan Mihai Simion combines a great show of different styles (tango, swing, old Romanian songs), minimalist decors painted, without LEDs and excellent light projections. Of course, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication (Leonardo da Vinci).

We are coming closer to a subject that was in debate in the COMM-IT session with number 49. Expertise.

The advancement of society is mainly driven by expertise and in-depth knowledge. This combination can create new solutions, that are more simple and easy to use. It can also create new fields of business and technology, using the power of knowledge and intelligence.

The transition of the tech world is facing today a correction loop, characterized by massive layoffs in the Technology sector from the US and worldwide. When one looks at the structure of the jobs that were considered redundant, one would see about 15% of the layoffs reported by layoffs.fyi are in support, consumer or fitness areas. I assume that most of the jobs were not with high sophistication and most likely affected a significant number of managers. In general, one could assume that higher expertise and utilization of co-bots would increase the productivity and the quality of the outcomes.

Investing in permanent upskilling, and looking for jobs that provide learning opportunities and constant delivery of results in the current jobs would be the right ways to maintain your relevance. My 2 cents here, as it is just an option among many others.

Coming back to the topic from the introduction, I used the music and the concert as a pretext to talk about career paths and this could be an easy way for you to generate new ideas: combine two things that apparently have little in common (RE: INVENT) and address one of the topics in depth (RE: DISTILL).