"AI-first" is the new Return To Office

Anil Dash:

being AI-first shows that a company is participating in the AI trend in the "right" way, by imposing it on workers, rather than trusting workers to judge what tools are useful for them to do their jobs.

Welcome to freedom through compulsion.

I'm actually old enough that I was at different workplaces when they started using spreadsheets and email and the web, and I can tell you, they absolutely didn't have to drive adoption by making people fill out paperwork about how they were definitely using the cool new technology. Isn't that interesting?

I’ve worked at companies where I couldn’t even get Figma for our team because of corporate standards for compliance, security, etc. But along comes AI with its questionable foundations, and that Trojan horse is gladly let in at the gates.

It's telling that the creators of so many of the AI tools don't even have enough confidence in their offerings to simply let users choose to adopt them, and are instead forcing them into users' faces in every possible corner of their apps and websites.

Anil’s is a great commentary on these AI-first company memos going around.

I don't think the audience for these memos is really the people who work at these companies. I think the audience is the other CEOs and investors and VCs in the industry, just as it was for the other fads of the last few years. And I expect that AI will indeed be part of how we evaluate performance in the future, but mostly in that the way CEOs communicate to their teams about technologies like AI will be part of how we all evaluate their performance as leaders.