Is there an AI evangalist in your office? Here’s what to do

Analysis: The gulf between AI’s promise and the reality does not seem to discourage evangalists, but there are other ways to deal with this nuisance

Artificial Intelligence is everywhere. Each week, we are inundated with stories telling us that AI will soon destroy civilisation, will take all of our jobs, will unleash a new era of scientific discovery, and that the bubble is about to burst, potentially taking the world economy down with it. There seems to be only one thing we can be sure of and that is nobody knows how AI will affect our lives.

In your workplace, there is almost certainly an AI evangelist (maybe even more than one), people who are convinced that AI is the best thing since sliced bread and that the solution to just about any problem in organisations is “more AI”. If you are lucky, they work in some other department. If you are very lucky, they are not the CEO or some high-level executive who can turn his (they are almost always men) AI obsession into marching orders for you and your co-workers. The pressure to use AI can be overwhelming, sometimes leading workers to engage in performative AI use and pretending to use AI to satisfy some order or mandate.

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AI evangelism can be a major source of stress. First, workers often receive orders to use more AI without any clear understanding of how to use it or what sorts of problems AI can or cannot solve. Second, AI is a potentially confusing world of models, platforms, and applications. Should you use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, xAI, Grok or something else? There is a growing suite of tools designed to help you choose among AI models or to compare the results of different models when applied to the same problem. In a sense, this just adds to the potential confusion since many AI users will not have a clear idea of which tool to use or why.

There are signs that organisational pressures to use AI for everything are starting to subside. AI can be useful, but it is also potentially expensive, and it is not always a good idea to throw AI at a task that can already be done inexpensively and well by humans. Indeed, fears about an AI bubble are partially driven by reports that companies are seeing very poor returns on their investment in AI.

At least so far (and probably for the foreseeable future), investments in AI have not led to notably higher productivity, innovation, or profits in most organisations. It is unlikely that the returns from applying AI to business problems in the near term will come close to the trillions that are being invested in building AI infrastructure.

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Unfortunately, the gulf between the promise of AI and the reality to date does not seem to discourage AI evangelists. They can point to similar gloom-and-doom predictions about the introduction of computers or about the internet and argue that AI will pay off hugely at some (undefined) point in the future.

What can you do when saddled with an AI evangelist in your organisation? If this person is a peer or subordinate, AI evangelism is likely to be an annoyance that is best treated by benign neglect. That is, treat your AI-loving peer the same way you would treat someone who goes on endlessly about some hobby that you find inexplicable. In these cases, an obsession with AI is no worse than someone who constantly goes on about Game of Thrones or Dungeons and Dragons.

Your questions might convince your boss that AI evangelism is more expensive and less simple than he or she though

Your real challenge is dealing with a supervisor, manager or executive who has caught the AI bug. Performative AI might be tempting, but it is expensive and risky. Your best bet when assigned a seemingly pointless application of AI (or even an application of AI that sounds like a good idea) is to make sure to ask for help with two things: (i) choosing the right AI model and forming good prompts and (ii) managing the sometimes-substantial costs of implementing AI models.

If might feel good to grumble and avoid the task, but a more effective response is to ask for assistance in making the best choices about which model to use and about getting the most from AI at the most manageable cost. It is possible that your boss has no clear idea that there are so many AI models and that some are quite costly. At worst, you will come off as a thoughtful employee who is trying to manage costs. At best, your questions might convince your boss that AI evangelism is more expensive and less simple than he or she thought.

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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ