On "The AI Perception-Reality Gap"

The gap between AI hype and customer reality is real, but it's not really about AI—it's about who controls the narrative. When VCs and vendors talk about displacement and replacement, they're selling urgency to boards and budgets. What customers actually care about is whether the tool saves time on mundane work without breaking their existing workflows, which is a much smaller and less exciting story. For practitioners, this means the actual ROI of AI implementations will keep disappointing because the benchmarks being set are utopian, not practical—and your job is figuring out what actually moves the needle in your stack, not what moves the discourse.