Who’s behind this

I have spent more than twelve years working in IT. I started as a level 2 and 3 support technician, fixing whatever broke. Later I became IT director for Spain at a multinational, and I am still there, running the infrastructure and support team — a team whose main job is redesigning the company’s internal processes. In other words, looking at how things get done and clearing away whatever wastes people’s time.

I started this for two reasons.

The first is that I have watched too many good people spend half their day on work that adds nothing: answering the phone twenty times, writing the same thing down in three places, chasing one piece of information. Those people are not slower or worse at their jobs. Nobody has taken the noise away from them. When you do, their work gets much better.

The second is that I think we are using artificial intelligence badly. People talk about it as if it were magic, or as if it were a threat, and it is neither. It is one more tool, the way the computer and email were. It is good at what it is good at, and the skill is knowing where to put it and where not to.