I work in AI every day, and lately I’ve realized that having a front-row seat to what is happening in this industry can be both incredibly exciting and a little anxiety-inducing.
It feels like every week there is something new that changes your understanding of what these systems are capable of. New models come out with capabilities that seemed years away not that long ago. We’re now watching systems like Astra tackle complex mathematical problems, coding agents build increasingly sophisticated software, and AI customer service become good enough that in many situations it is difficult to immediately tell whether you are talking to a person or a machine.
And when you are surrounded by this every day, your brain naturally starts extrapolating.
What happens to software engineering? What happens to customer service? What happens to consulting? What happens to my company? What should I be learning? What should we be building? Am I moving fast enough?
I think a lot of people working in technology are feeling some version of this right now.
But then I leave the AI bubble and talk to physical world business owners, and suddenly the world looks completely different.
There is another economy happening outside the AI bubble
Through my work, I get to interact with businesses across very different industries and levels of technological maturity. And one of the most interesting things I’ve learned is that there are plenty of very successful businesses whose owners barely think about AI.
Some aren’t even fully digital.
They have customers. They employ people. They make money. They understand their industries incredibly well. They have relationships that have taken decades to build.
And somewhere inside the operation there might still be a spreadsheet being emailed around, a PDF being manually processed, an employee copying information between systems, or a piece of software that hasn’t meaningfully changed in 15 years.
AI isn’t keeping these business owners awake at night, running their business is. That has been an important reality check for me.
When you spend enough time in technology, especially right now, it is easy to believe the entire world is experiencing the same technological acceleration you are.
It isn’t. We have a front-row seat.
The gap is enormous
Inside the tech bubble, we’re discussing agents that can reason, write software, use computers, and increasingly execute complex workflows.
Outside of it, millions of people are still figuring out how AI fits into their day-to-day work. And that gap might actually be one of the biggest opportunities of the next decade and what we at ODS are trying to be part of.
Because these businesses don’t necessarily need the latest model or the most sophisticated autonomous agent. Sometimes they need someone to help them stop entering the same information three times. Sometimes they need their systems connected. Sometimes they need software modernized. Sometimes they need their data organized before AI can even become useful. And sometimes AI can now make all of those things dramatically easier to accomplish.
There is still an unbelievable amount of work to do.
Technology changes faster than people do
Customer service is a good example.
AI customer service is getting remarkably good, and I have no doubt that it will continue replacing or augmenting many interactions that historically required a person. But something else is also true: people still want to talk to people.
When something is important, complicated, emotional, expensive, or simply frustrating, there is still value in knowing there is another human being on the other side.
Technology can change incredibly quickly. Human behavior doesn’t necessarily move at the same speed.
I think we sometimes underestimate that when we’re sitting at the frontier.
A capability existing doesn’t mean every company will adopt it tomorrow, and adoption doesn’t mean every customer will immediately change their behavior.
Those transitions take time.
You can’t ignore what is happening
The existence of this enormous world outside the AI bubble shouldn’t make anyone in technology complacent.
If anything, I think it makes the opportunity, and the responsibility to evolve even bigger.
The way we build software is changing. The way we analyze data is changing. The way we design products, operate businesses, and interact with customers is changing.
Some of the skills that made us valuable five years ago will become less important. Others like judgment, architecture, domain expertise, creativity, communication, and understanding what problem is actually worth solving may become much more important.
I don’t know exactly where that leaves every job in technology. I don’t think anyone does.
That’s probably part of the anxiety.
Two things can be true at the same time
AI is moving unbelievably fast and the world is going to take a long time to catch up.
Those of us building with these technologies have the strange privilege of watching the future arrive a little earlier than everyone else. Some days that feels exciting. Other days it feels completely crazy.
Then I talk to a business owner running a successful company and I’m reminded how much of the economy still exists outside our little technology bubble.
There are businesses that haven’t adopted AI. There are businesses that haven’t moved to the cloud. There are businesses that haven’t finished their first real digital transformation. And many of them are doing perfectly fine.
Eventually, these two worlds will collide.
For those of us in technology, I think that’s both the source of the anxiety and the opportunity. We have a front-row seat to something moving incredibly fast. Now we have to figure out how to bring the rest of the world along with us.