It’s All About RoI

AI · English · Remote Work

2 minutes

Large boring open office with employees all wearing the same clothes and watching the same content on their monitors

“Back to the office” and the push for “AI into everything” have the same underlying cause.

Collusion regarding Return on Investment. You see, what happened during/after Covid when companies realized a large part of their workforce produced better quality work out of their homes than from the office, they were first overjoyed. Happier and more productive employees who were much more inclined to put in time when needed outside of regular office hours? Who could complain!

The real estate companies complained. And those, in turn, are owned by other companies - who at the board and/or group level are some of those that own the very companies who were overjoyed at their remote workers.

It turned out that a downturn in office real estate would have huge effects on the economy, and would affect the very companies with the remote workers.

… and so “Back to the office” it was. It never had anything to do with productivity, just1 economic fallout scenarios way more important (?) than employee happiness and productivity.

But of course you knew that.

“AI into everything” is the same. An enormous amount of money has been invested into AI startups and data centers for model training. If that bubble bursts too quickly2 the result will be an economic depression, definitely in the IT sector but likely across the whole economy. Thus it doesn’t matter that workers work better from their homes, sorry, that work is done better - still3 - by humans than by our current LLMs, the charade has to go on.

That also means that your small company, outside of any economic entanglement at that level, can go and disrupt the status quo. You will be faster, nimbler, spending less money on office space and data centers - and have happier employees

Go slay dragons.

  1. In some cases it was an excuse to be able to fire people without having to actually fire them, pretending that the economic outlook of the company was better than it was
  2. It is bursting, but slowly, as expected from the Gartner hype curve
  3. Today’s LLMs are too static. We’ll have this discussion again when they become trained-from-usage thinking engines rather than crappy databases