Gerald Haslhofer 
PC first vs. AI first
For some reason I was reminded of a book that greatly influenced my thinking in college about how metaphors shape the way perceive the world around us and guide our thinking and actions in unique ways (go check it out: Gareth Morgan, “Images of Organizations”, e.g. here at Amazon If I look back over the last few years in engineering for a major software company, there have been four guiding metaphors (or call them lenses etc.) we’ve been looking through
- PC / device first
- Cloud first
- Mobile first
- AI first
It’s important to note that depending on what lens you look through as your “primary cognition device”, you’ll find drastically different solutions for common topics. Let me use “clipboard / copy & paste” as an example.
PC / device first Through the “PC first” lens Microsoft did investments in Windows 8 and beyond in PC centric clipboard APIs to enable long known Windows features for Modern / UWP apps. They were entirely based on a single PC / cross app POV.
Cloud first Once we view things through our “Cloud first” lens we of course start thinking about “Cloud clipboard” and cross device experiences. PC, welcome to the internet.
Mobile first With “Continue Now / Continue Later” features we are now finally applying a “mobile first” perspective (which makes sense with 2bn active Android devices) and realize that many flows in the mobile world start on a phone.
AI first Once you put on your AI glasses you start thinking about what a clipboard and copy / paste would look like if you employed AI / ML: welcome to copyless paste
Which really is an entirely new thing – a new value proposition for something as mundane as copy & paste?
A good experiment is to consciously look at all the things we’re doing in engineering and figure out what the primary lens is for each one of them, or what would happen if we suddenly put on a different set of glasses and e.g. took an “AI first” view instead of a “cloud first” or “device first” view. This is hard if you’ve never been exposed to or personally dove deeply into AI, or have never been exposed to mobile in a visceral way (i.e. the way millennials experience mobile or your friends in China, not for those who still remember the Motorola StarTAC and how attractive the clamshell was and how amazing SMSs are.).
None of these perspectives are inherently good or bad, they just show different facets and lead to very different approaches. Still, “AI first” is the most novel lens and offers up substantial new value creation opportunities. Hence we need to drive these capabilities deeply into the software engineering orgs so more and more people have those lenses as their primary filter (or at least one they want to use from time to time). If we don’t, we’ll naturally loose many avenues to drive novel customer value. For those only now catching up on Mobile, wouldn’t it make sense trying to leapfrog and deeply embed “AI first” into our current and future thinking by fully immersing us in it with highest priority? Food for thought…
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