AI Can’t Replace Your CTO
Like other times in the past 35 years, think Y2k when the world held its breath to see if all technology would cease working at midnight, we are once again standing at the edge, holding our breath to see if LLM’s will, dramatically put, take over the world.
It’s an interesting time to be in business and particularly in the business of IT and cyber security. What AI is asking us to do is to adapt rapidly. And rapid adaptations are a risk. On one hand, those who are refusing to step into the new age of AI will likely become irrelevant, on the other, those who jump in too early, without assessing the risk, will likely run their business into the ground. So what’s the answer? Like most things in life and business, we are being asked to discern where the line between benefit and harm lies.
So how do we do that? How do we make incredibly important decisions about our day-to-day operations, our employees, and our technology strategy in a space where truthfully there is more unknown than there is known?
What we’ve learned over 35 years in this industry is that technology is incredibly smart, but it lacks wisdom. You need the balance of wisdom: a human voice curated through experience, questioning, discerning, and gauging what’s right. AI can give you answers that are run of the mill, that will work for the many, but it doesn’t yet know you.
AI can’t replace your CTO.
If you’ve played with Chat GPT, CoPilot or other Generative AI’s, you already know the excitement and the frustration that come with these tools.
On the one hand, there are things AI brings to the table that are quite frankly wonderful. We can organize data and time management like never before. We can sit down with our computer and brainstorm with a “team” of experts, learn new skills, and push the bounds of what we were capable of alone. AI used well can close the gap between a great idea and the execution of that idea.
And… we can spend hours rewriting the draft Chat GPT spit out because it just doesn’t sound human. Or worse, we learn the hard way that AI can lie and invent information that sounds convincingly real. We can lose our day and our credibility by trying to get AI to be something it isn’t.
There are a lot of AI startups popping up right now and it’s important to remember: their goal is to sell you something. YOU have to discern which models are truly up to par before making decisions with drastic consequences because you thought AI would save you money.
To be frank, if you’re not asking whether or not that new AI Agent you just gave access to your company data, credit card, messaging platforms, contacts, and chat history is encrypted, you shouldn’t be making the decision to adapt it into your tech strategy. And in case you were wondering- it’s not. You gave it permission to “act as you” and didn’t realize you also opened a back door to hackers and scammers.
We often forget that technology is neutral; it can be used for good or for harm. For just as many ways that AI tools will improve your business and the missions behind why you do what you do, there will be people who implement these LLM’s to extort you. It’s more important than ever to know how you are protected from these bad actors.
Will AI change everything; will it take over the world? Maybe. But we don’t know what we don’t know. So, now is the time for reason. It’s the time to adapt but to do so with skill, discernment, and wisdom. There are companies like ours who will step in as your CTO, who will take the time to understand your business, your needs and your mission, who will ask the right questions and take steps to protect your data so that this emerging technology can do the good we know it is capable of.
After 35 years, we can honestly say, the one thing that hasn’t changed is that the right business partnership can change everything.
DataTrends Technology – Your Trusted Partner In IT
~ Written by a human
Author: Kiana Dunn
Marketing Director at DataTrends Technology