Voice of the DBA

I saw an article on AI usage that is based on an upcoming book that suggests redesigning the world around new tech, not adding it to existing things. The first example is how electricity was introduced to existing factories, but it only provided some incremental gains until new factories were redesigned around electric motors. There’s also an example given about reworking hotels to remove the front desk since that feature isn’t needed. Instead, people could walk in, and an employee with a tablet could find them to check them in.

I’m all for rethinking and redesigning processes. I do think we have a huge glut of software in many organizations that exists because processes have evolved across time, but not everything and we keep our old software. When we have a new need or want a new capability, we add new software (or add features), but we don’t necessarily throw out all the old software, processes, or habits. That wouldn’t be practical, often because when we implement something new, it might not meet all our needs. Or at least we don’t know it meets our needs at first.

I don’t love the examples, especially as I see organizations where Teams/Slack are heavily in use (not just in tech companies), and these tools have changed how people work. Not everyone has moved, and there is a lot of document sharing and legacy systems, but that’s also because not everyone wants to or can change at the same pace. However, lots of people have changed how they create, share, collaborate, communicate, and more because of these tools.

I also think the hotel example is silly (read the article to see more). I don’t need a desk, and often I check in and get my key without ever visiting a desk. However, I do like the desk because when I need something, I want to be able to find someone, not wander around looking for an employee or waiting for them to respond to some page. When there’s a desk I can see someone is there. I certainly don’t want a kiosk with an AI there to queue at to request a person help me.

GenAI LLMs are going to change work for a lot of people, especially those in tech. I don’t know that we can redesign the way we work now, as the technology is still advancing, and I’m not sure how we will want to integrate agents with GenAI to do work. We have to experiment and find ways to use this tech before we build too much. We also have to see it mature.

When we do, I bet many more people will start to use AI to generate code, change settings, deploy things, and more. I’m also sure that they will make many mistakes, at scale, and we’ll be using a GenAI agent to undo things, or perhaps we’ll have humans scrambling to fix systems. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the humans commonly fixing things as we might not trust the AI Agent (or our prompting) to fix our mistake.

If you could redesign work, what would you want out of an AI? Assume that it is at least as competent as someone you work with. Is there a way that a GenAI system would make your work smoother?

Steve Jones

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