I started watching an AI demo yesterday that promised to show me how to build tools insanely fast.
I switched off after a few minutes.
For one simple reason – it skipped over the real work.
The demo assumed data was readily available – clean, structured, and good to use.
But when you build real world applications, getting the data is the hard part – that’s what takes the time.
It’s easy to analyse clean and tidy datasets.
It’s much harder dealing with a mess of files, formats, layouts and data entry styles.
There used to be a saying about graphical user interfaces. They make it simple to do simple things, and impossible to do complex things.
I’m seeing a similar thing with AI. We’re presenting simple things like dashboards and charts like they’re breakthrough technologies, when they’ve actually been around for ages.
The demos I want to see are different.
Show me AI working with messy data and helping with the practical problems organisations face every day.
That’s when AI use stops being theatre and starts to create real value.
Handcrafted insight 