The Excavator Problem

Imagine you’re a guy digging a hole.

You have a shovel, and you’re good with it. You’re strong and experienced. You know where to start, how to pace yourself, and about how long it will take you.

The boss comes by and gives you an excavator.

So you hop in and start to figure it out. It takes a little while, but once you get the hang of it, you can dig in half a day what was going to take a month.

That’s productivity, right?

Of course, but at the individual level. The excavator made you 10 or 100 times more productive.

But what if the hole is the foundation for a shopping center?

You’re done digging the hole by lunch, but the concrete crew isn’t scheduled to show up until next month. The forms aren’t ready. Oh, and the drawings are waiting for approval. The inspector’s on vacation. The builder’s got three other jobs before this one. The steel shipment got lost. It’s been raining for a week and a half.

Although you sped up digging the hole, you didn’t really speed up building the shopping center.

Now it’s a project problem. A system problem.

Today, AI is the excavator.

But we’re working on also making it the system.

Stay tuned.