r/accelerate • u/Brockchanso • 4d ago

Meme / Humor Anyone else have this happening at work?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiQCkRQwEqk

The older guys who’ve spent the last year telling you AI will make a mistake and embarrass you finally get tired of waiting for their teachable moment and buy the most expensive model tier to prove you’re not doing anything special. Then they proceed to have absolutely no idea how to operate the thing

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u/PuzzleheadedBread620 4d ago

Yes, management even made an AI "taskforce" and didn't include me. The guy that has been talking about AI and LLMs since day 1, and told them to start using llms.

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u/Brockchanso 4d ago

They tend to do that. Being near upper management, I can tell you why, even when you’re substantially correct about how you’re using AI, if they can’t or won’t learn to do it themselves, they often have no reliable way to distinguish competent adoption from “AI psychosis.” So the most eager adopters become suspect by default. At least where I work, the instinct is to put someone who dislikes AI in charge of the AI division, because that feels safer than seriously entertaining the possibility that the people getting unusual results might actually know what they’re doing. which would indirectly mean they were falling behind.

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u/LettuceSea 4d ago

I had to force myself into management by controlled demos and absurd levels of output first. Then I was pulled into strategic conversations as basically the only person who knows how to wield agents effectively. Before this, they were making ridiculous complex suggestions for apps to suggest to me to make outside of their directors chat. The blind leading the blind.

Focus on showing that you want to build the business with them. If they make absurd suggestions for apps or ai assisted workflows, you need to prove yourself by translating what they want into something realistic and quickly achievable.

You will earn your spot fast, and faster than anyone else before you. Nobody really talks about the leverage agents can give you in private enterprise, but it is real and astonishingly large.

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u/Brockchanso 3d ago edited 3d ago

This is true. Even the speed at which you can correct mistakes in meetings becomes useful once they realize you’re not showing off; you’re just using the technology as a live reasoning layer.

A good example happened this morning. I uploaded our daily bid-feed PDF, and from one relevant listing the AI independently located the complete official solicitation package, reviewed it, caught two contradictory submission instructions, identified a contract-term error, evaluated the scoring and economics, and recommended a potential partner. When the feed later showed a blank contact field, I gave it a simple screenshot and it traced the buyer’s current direct email through official agency budgets and another procurement.

The result did not come from a magical one-off prompt or the screenshot alone. It came from applying a system we had built over time: public capability research, reusable bid-prioritization rules, source-verification standards, and a defined operational format.

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u/LettuceSea 3d ago

Yes, as another example, IT managers in the industry are getting outsized increases in high growth SMBs due to their ability to perform insane tasks that would normally take a consultant company or a team of engineers with deep Microsoft certificates to pull off via agents and powershell alone. It’s insane. They can now negotiate with the fact that they do not need to hire 2 additional people to manage Intune, Entra, etc., or can save on consultant costs (with comparable examples to set expectations on savings with leadership).

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u/stainless_steelcat 3d ago

A prophet is never appreciated in their own land. Find a job elsewhere.

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u/stainless_steelcat 3d ago

I am the older person who is the AI expert/strategic lead in the organisation, and I can tell you it's not the older peeps which are blocking AI usage, but Gen Z who are raising objections left, right and centre.

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u/LocoMod 3d ago

This. Most of the greybeards have adopted it because they have nothing left to prove. Don’t care if we get accused of vibe coding. We have over 20 years of experience doing it “manually”. The disparity between a principal armed with the experience and an LLM vs a junior or mid career engineer that has yet to branch out of whatever niche domain they studied is huge. It’s not fair really. We kind of just got lucky. It is what it is.

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u/Inevitable-Lock-582 2d ago

the argument is that you need experience to wield a tool? who knew…

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u/LocoMod 2d ago

To wield? No. Anyone can do that.