Maybe some devs here can help me, I was recently promoted to “head of AI” at my work despite being very outwardly ambivalent towards it. So I’m struggling to figure out what would actually create value instead of just being an expensive waste of time but still satisfy the higher ups AI lust.
My first idea that I thought would actually be useful was just setting up the architecture for an actual analytics database for us and then let them explore it with metabase (then letting them use Claude for their wow factor of exploring it with AI or whatever).
But now I’m somewhat at a loss, so any insight you all have would be really helpful!
It depends on your company.
If you are running public-facing code, security is going to become a huge deal in coming months. So use AI to find all the security holes in your stuff before the hackers do.
If you have lots of databases and APIs for internal use, create a MCP server so agents can do anything with your data and APIs.
If your data is even a little sensitive and you don’t want to send it all to the USA (read up on the CLOUD act), look into running models locally and the hardware investments you’ll need to make.
I hadn’t considered making an MCP server for our stuff, it feels obvious in retrospect, thanks! As for the self hosting I’d definitely love to but convincing a small company to shell out the kind of money to run something strong enough locally is something I don’t think is going to be likely, even if it’d cost less in the long run.
It’s your job to do the cost analysis. Then you present your findings and the execs decide whether to lay the up-front cost, depending on how much benefit they see it providing based on your assessment of the potential applications to the business.
Look into private mode ai by edgeless systems. Affordable and private.