> For ongoing projects, an effective trick that I believe I picked up from Secrets of Consulting is the anonymous poll, where you can ask individuals to rate their opinion of an AI project’s success chances on a scale of 1 to 10. The typical split I have observed is half of those involved rating the project at a 3/10 and others at around an 8/10 – a clear bimodal split on a project that was already three years late. Bringing this data to a CEO can be an effective method of pointing out that some information is clearly being hidden from them on the state of the project.

I don't think this is a very effective method of getting any kind of truth. Just as the people pushing the initiatives up top have incentive to lie about its success, people on the ground have incentive to lie about the opposite - for instance, in my org, we've pretty much just used it to automate tedium, and accelerate processes, and realized pretty quickly there were roles that were almost entirely automatable tedium and managing process - surprise surprise, those people are very negative about how useful AI is.

The tools are useful, there is no doubt, but the excitement and investment is simply way, way too high. I'm lucky at my org they have taken a more cautious "let's see what happens" approach, and want proof of any claimed successes.

How about E) All of the above?

Every executive team is under AI hypnosis.

We’ve done pretty basic stuff like expose a bunch of data sources over MCP and our nontechnical employees are now able to answer questions and build interactive data visualizations they would never have been able to do before.

I think this article is way too negative and I would question the authors bias; I don’t think it’s hard to see how valuable these tools are.

Well, it didn't take long for this post to be disappeared from the front page.

Edit: ahhh, I see why. In the list of ways to keep your sanity through the AI mania -- "I no longer visit Hackernews, Reddit, or really anywhere where I am going to be drip-fed nonsense."