A clip from our spring 2025 GenAI workshop for mission-driven teams, with AlignIQ founder Dan Garmat. Recorded April 2025.
Why it’s so hard to know what AI can do right now: rapid investment, weekly announcements, and a frontier that runs further in some places than others.
Key takeaways
- AI investment has risen sharply, and something is announced as a big deal nearly every week.
- The cycle runs hype, then disillusionment, then people working out what’s productive.
- The “jagged technological frontier”: on some tasks the hype turns out partly right, on others it doesn’t, and the line isn’t where you’d guess.
- There are so many new features that keeping a mental map of them is difficult. That’s a reason to test on your own work, not follow headlines.
Try this with your team
Each person names one task where AI surprised them by being good and one where it disappointed. Map them on a whiteboard: that’s your team’s own jagged frontier.
Going further
wAI-Finder helps a team find where AI helps them, among all the noise. Or start free with the AI Opportunity & Risk Snapshot.
Sources mentioned
- Dell’Acqua, Mollick and colleagues, “Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier” (Harvard Business School working paper, 2023)
More from this series
Transcript
Lightly edited from YouTube’s automatic captions for readability. Wording and order are the speakers’ own.
One of the big challenges we have is that the technology is changing really rapidly. AI investment is up a huge amount in the last few years, and partly as a result, something is announced as a big deal every week. So there’s a lot of hype, then people go through a period of disillusionment, and eventually they figure out what is actually productive.
A way to talk about what’s happening is that there’s a jagged technological frontier. On some things the hype turns out partially right, and on some things it doesn’t. And there are just so many AI features that keep coming out that it’s very difficult to keep a map of them in your mind.