Summary Bullets:

• Artificial intelligence (AI) is the big, hyped technology right now and hasn’t even hit peak hype

• Don’t let the all-encompassing AI hype push your organization into implementation before proper planning

AI is the overhyped buzz technology right now and hasn’t reached peak hype yet. Investors are pouring money into startups for and around AI. Vendors and managed services providers (including cloud hyperscalers) are all adding offerings around AI. Some of these offerings are long planned and maybe only a little rushed – some involve adding the term “AI” to the product title and marketing material, but feature little more than they did before.

From a social standpoint, science fiction movies, books, and short stories are all contributing to fear of AI, and fear of it taking control over people. Media and creative organizations are mistakenly thinking that AI can create new content and at the same time be cheaper and easier to deal with than writers. Students are misusing it for writing academic papers. Copyright and plagiarism issues are a problem, much AI is trained on found data, not data it has permission to use for training. Unethical use cases abound and are growing, but where the line lays is blurred.

But the biggest problem with the overhype around AI is the urgency that it puts into the hearts of boards of directors, CEOs, and CIOs. Suddenly, every company has to have a plan about how they are going to utilize AI, and one they can confer to investors, partners, and customers. This is regardless of how much AI they use now, or how much was in their plans, and whether or not they are prepared to use AI. The view is that every scrap of data is valuable and that if they just throw an AI at *any* data and suddenly reveal marvelous, even magical results, and they will ride at the head of a triumphal procession with banners and all the spoils of AI.

This pressure always flows down to IT and non-IT staff as well. AI becomes the metaphorical hammer, and every problem, data store, and business process suddenly looks like a nail. New projects are started and others are ended in order to start AI projects, with little or no analysis and planning of exactly how AI can help and where. This approach is often defended by pointing at the plethora of analysis, media articles, and CIO surveys saying they are all-in on AI. Analysts and media cover hype, that’s entirely normal. There has never been a hyped technology that isn’t high on a survey of CIOs – look at how many swore up and down they were all-in on 5G.

AI can be a good thing. AI can really make a difference for an enterprise or institution. Most companies already use it or will be soon. Careful thought and planning is the way forward. Enterprises need to understand the application of AI, and know what questions to ask of an AI. They need to understand the limitations of current AI, and that garbage data in still means garbage data out. Don’t let the pressure of the hype turn AI into a hammer and every business or IT problem into a nail.