You Are Faking It

This week in AI & marketing

More than half (63%) of workers are lying about their AI skills. A recent study confirms this, though the researchers are nice enough to call it “exaggerating.” We are not that nice, I guess.

And you would think it’s the boomers and Gen X. The generations sitting in the armchairs and corner offices are the ones who lie the most, right? By a planetary distance, it’s Gen Z.

Now, we are not just less nice, but also very pragmatic. And, to be honest, old. We’ve seen a lot. So we assume innovation cycles are called cycles because they repeat. The one we keep coming back to here is the late-90s digitalization cycle. You know, when everything moved from paper to the cloud. There was a thing called the Internet, and everyone wanted to have something online.

What happened there? Jimmy, the 60-year-old boss, who’d seen a computer at a tech expo once but still ran his business through his Rolodex and his secretary, and who was an avid fan of Dale Carnegie self-help books, saw a blue ocean opportuni…