By Andre Jay, Director of Technology, Warp Technologies
The AI boom is real. So is the nonsense.
If you work in tech, you’ve already heard the pitch. AI is going to transform everything. No industry untouched. No function left behind. This time, it’s different.
And maybe it is. But the way we’re approaching it? That’s the part worth questioning.
Everyone’s suddenly an AI expert
Two years ago, they were digital transformation gurus. Today, they’re AI strategists. Same hustle, new acronym.
These are the people throwing GenAI into slide decks like parsley on a cheap dinner. They’re not here to do the hard work. They’re here for hype. The workshops. The LinkedIn impressions. The retainers.
It’s not that AI can’t drive value. It can. But right now, a lot of what’s being sold is theatre. Shiny tools. Predictable outputs. Nothing built to last.
ChatGPT isn’t a strategy
You can ask a chatbot for an AI vision, stick it in a deck, and pitch it to the board. Plenty are doing exactly that. It feels futuristic, but it’s shallow.
Real AI work doesn’t come with instant answers. It’s slow. It’s messy. It needs decisions. Trade-offs. Systems thinking. Most of all, it needs people who actually understand the tech and aren’t just dressing it up to sound clever.
The real stuff? It’s boring. And that’s the point.
The teams doing meaningful AI work aren’t shouting about it on social. They’re deep in workflows. They’re untangling data messes, training models that don’t behave, getting buy-in from stakeholders who still think “AI” means robots.
There’s no glamour in versioning pipelines or managing edge cases. But that’s where the value lives.
So what now?
Stop rewarding the pitch. Start asking harder questions. Who built this? How does it work? What happens when it fails?
Good AI isn’t cheap. Or fast. Or easy. But it is possible. You just need the right people in the room, and the patience to do it properly.
That’s what we’re focused on at Warp. Not just getting AI in the building. Making it work for the business, for the long haul.
Andre Jay is the Director of Technology at Warp Technologies. He builds things that work and occasionally rants about the things that don’t.
