Forget adopting AI. It’s time to adapt.
Your BitBakery update for January 2025
As we do every year, our team took some time off during the holidays to refresh and recharge. For myself, I ended up catching a cold and added “recover” to the list of things to do. That forced rest from illness gave me a lot of time to read and think, more than I would normally have given myself.
So what did I think about? The same thing you’re probably thinking about now after scrolling through LinkedIn or reading the news. That’s right. AI. We might have taken a break, but the pundits and promoters of AI did not. We’re only a few days into the new year, and already we’re seeing more predictions around AI adoption, AI bubbles, and what to do about AI slop.
It can be easy to think of AI as a recent paradigm shift. OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2023, and it feels like it’s the only thing we’ve talked about for the last two years. In that short time, we’ve seen a rush to adopt AI—sometimes without taking the time to truly understand the problem we’re trying to solve and what the impact AI will have on our businesses and teams.
It’s the return of the “move fast and break things” mentality on an exponentially larger scale than any of us could have imagined.
But AI isn’t new. Nor our efforts to adopt it into how we work.
AI pioneer Jeffery Hinton began his research at the University of Edinburgh in the 1970s. Advancements in machine learning and computer vision over the last four decades have given us everyday technologies, from face and fingerprint scanners to recommendations on Netflix and Spotify.
A locally-connected story over the holiday break reminded me of how long AI has been around. AI chip developer Groq (not to be confused with Elon Musk’s Grok) announced a licensing deal with Nvidia to the tune of $20 billion. One of the early investors in Groq was Garage Capital, founded by local tech leaders Michael Litt, Mike McCauley, and Devon Galloway.
It was an investment made ten years ago that has paid off handsomely for Garage Capital’s partners. It’s also a reminder that adopting AI isn’t meant to happen overnight. Leaders who understand that successfully planning AI adoption is a long game are the ones who will reap the rewards.
If you want to talk about AI adoption and the challenges your business is facing, I’m always available for a call.
- Wes