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!
Not sure on the size of your team, but you could perhaps form a small subset of AI “champions” who can try to help drive new initiatives. Just some ideas:
Start out with foundational usage of AI agents, ensure people have the right mindset and ownership of using the ai agents. Ensure there is always a “human in the loop.”
Arrange for some training for people (not just Devs) on the right way of using AI, such as not throwing sensitive information into it. Educate people that it’s far from perfect
Get standard boundaries in place for your current and future projects, get context files (agent.md) for your projects so those who do use the agents will be doing so from the best position.
See if you can arrange with the higher ups to arrange some company time do a Hackathon with the use of AI to help people see what they can do with it and the challenges they’ll face. You can also take some learnings from it.
The way I see it, you’ve been given the position of head of AI because you’re indifferent. It’s your job now to drive engagement (because that’s what your bosses want) but in a controlled manner. If they put someone that was overly enthusiastic about AI they would end up with a huge bill and lots of AI mess to clean up.