🔗 AI, Tools and Transformation, Benedict Evans

Narrowly, that means that the task to be automated might be sitting in plain sight but the people with that task don’t see it. This is what leads to the idea of the ‘forward-deployed engineer’ - someone who is a builder, and knows what AI can build, can ‘just’ walk around a law firm or an architecture office and see the opportunities lying on the table that the lawyer or the architect doesn’t see.

The deeper problem is most of what we’ve automated in the last few decades wasn’t obvious, even if you are a tool-builder, and didn’t have an obvious solution either. We can all think of examples of stuff we use every day where our first reaction was “Why would I want that?” Very often, it’s not obvious that the problem exists, and very often it’s embedded or bundled or hidden inside something else.