John Collison: belief

Transcript context

…of AI, will we actually think of our companies as a collection of processes, have people responsible them with KPIs who can apply AI. I think I bring it up just because that's my theory of the world. I might be wrong, I might be right, but I'm not sure companies are set up to essentially absorb the benefits of AI efficiently right now, and we need to do that to really do so. But the bigger point, I think, is that there's the paradox of, well, you want more software engineers. But on top of that, most of the world isn't just digital technology. I think a lot of the people in the AGI community have only ever worked at a research lab or a software company. You look around, you're like, "Wow, AI is going to do all of this." As they walk by the flower shop and get their coffee at the coffee shop, and you think about the local flower shop, if you took all the AI in the world and gave it to that, you gave it super intelligence, how much would it impact the flower shop's operations? Maybe a little. I mean, I'm sure it would help, don't get me wrong, but someone's still clipping the ends of the stems of the flowers, arranging the bouquets, and thanking you on your way out the door, and congratulating you for your daughter's wedding, or whatever it is. I think if you think about what parts of the economy can absorb intelligence really efficiently, it's certainly software, and we're seeing that already. Finance seems particularly meaningful here because so much of finance today is just digital information. Everything's in digital systems now, not even just crypto. I mean, just everything's in digital ledgers everywhere. It still doesn't touch a wet lab. It still can't do a clinical trial. You still need to get a crate from this country to that country on a ship. As a consequence, I think I'm not sure we'll see the productivity enhancement we see in software in every sector as quickly. Then on top of that, I think companies need to stop just giving Copilot to every employee and be like, "We're AI now," and start to think about from first principles, what are the parts of your business that have a lot of digital workflows? Where can AI have a real big impact? How do you actually set up your company to actually have someone accountable to drive that? That feels like a real big change management opportunity that most companies haven't done. Just to push on that. Software engineering, I think we clearly are seeing a lot of AI productivity gains. Software engineers have always loved tools and the latest tools and are just headlong diving into it. Then you have stuff like you see in the flower shop, and stuff that requires really good robotics that we're far away from. That will take a while. What I'm talking about is like— And by the way, I might prefer a flower shop with the florist.…

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