https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-code-security Everyone always wants to clone their best employees. Unfortunately, that's not legal - but expanding their workload/output with AI resources and training offers a strong alternative. I have cases where throwing more people at a problem doesn't solve the issue, as a new person takes too long to get up to speed, no matter how talented they are. Tools like these are inevitable - and acquiring the people who know how to use them, or giving our top performers some time to learn, are what we've decided to focus on. I believe that AI will have a correction, but not at the magnitude of .com. I hope that I'm not wrong by going "all in" and jumping on this bandwagon. Any thoughts before I chug this Kool-aid? I did predict Canada wrong in hockey. 🤷‍♂️

Interesting Article from the Information: "Amazon is among a growing list of tech giants that are tracking workers’ internal AI usage and using it as a factor in decisions on pay and promotions." Amazon prides itself on being data obsessed, and its approach to tracking its own employees’ use of AI has been no different. Amazon has been using an internal system called Clarity to track how often employees use AI tools in their work, two people with knowledge of the tracking said. (Clarity also tracks other things about employees, such as in-person office attendance, the people said.) That includes data on overall AI usage by team and—for at least some managers—details on which AI tools people are using, including Amazon’s coding tool, Kiro. Amazon says it encourages employees to use its in-house AI tools as well as certain approved tools made by other companies. "Understanding how employees adopt new technology helps us support them in using the latest tools to innovate in their day to day and deliver for customers,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “We focus on AI adoption and sharing best practices to celebrate innovation and operational efficiency gains across the company—whether that’s during a review process or throughout the year.” Apart from tracking time spent on AI tools, some leaders in Amazon have been asking for more details on how employees are using AI to work more efficiently. That includes the company’s supply chain optimization technology team, known as SCOT, which has played a key role in managing costs in Amazon’s massive retail and logistics business, such as figuring out how to balance speedy delivery with keeping fulfillment costs low.

@Jeff Hyman Great insight, thanks for sharing. You uncovered a few other things here when I read between the lines. As a small company, it is difficult to attract 10's when competing against the big guys. We're always looking for that prodigy and this makes you step back and focus on the deep bench as you state. Also, Norway has such a small population compared to their results. It reinforces that the right strategy can give a smaller company the edge. Also, are there really any 10's available in AI anyway? Does anyone know what that is? Take your advice and focus on the DNA and the AI is a bonus. I'm about to lose some friends and this will be my jinx - thankfully Norway doesn't focus on hockey...Go Canada!

Any good questions to ask during interviews regarding AI? I’ve asked: What are your thoughts on AI? What tools do you use? why? How would you mentor other team members in this direction? What would you do with the ones that don’t follow? How do you continue educating yourself? These are kind of “Miss America” type questions that can be answered with fluff or a quick Google/AI search. Are there any suggestions on questions (or follow-on questions) that can help determine that they’re speaking on actual practice and not theory? I want to learn what they actually know, not what they think I want to hear them say. Thanks in advance.

My first job out of grad school was at Intuit ... makers of QuickBooks and TurboTax. I had no idea that what I learned there would be the single most useful lesson for leading through AI ... 30 years later. Here's what happened. Intuit's co-founders, Scott Cook and Tom Proulx, had a problem. They'd built Quicken, personal finance software they thought was intuitive. Customers said it was great in surveys. But support calls kept flooding in. Surveys lied. Focus groups lied. People told Intuit what they thought Intuit wanted to hear. So Scott & Tom invented something radical. They called it "Follow Me Home" research. The concept was dead simple: Ask a customer buying the software at a retail store if an Intuit employee could literally follow them home and watch them use it. No helping. No guiding. Just observing. (People said yes, kinda bizarre.) What they discovered was brutal. People didn't read the instruction manual. They didn't follow the Setup Wizard. They invented bizarre workarounds that no engineer would have predicted. The gap between how Intuit designed the experience and how people actually experienced it was ginormous. That gap changed everything about how Intuit built products. We adopted the assumption that nobody would ever read the instruction manual. And this should change everything about how you approach AI in your organization. Here's the connection: Right now, most leaders I talk to are doing one of two things with AI. They're either (1) dabbling with tools themselves & assuming their experience reflects their team's reality. Or they're (2) surveying their people ... asking "Are you using AI?" and "Do you find it helpful?" ... and getting polished, useless answers. Both approaches have the same flaw Scott & Tom discovered in the early '90s. People don't do what they say they do. Your marketing director will tell you she's "using AI for content creation." What does that actually mean? Is she pasting entire strategy docs into ChatGPT and blindly publishing the output? Is she using it to brainstorm headlines and then rewriting every one? You have no idea ... and neither does she, really, until someone watches. Literally.