Artificial Intelligence (AI). The latest hotness in the tech world. If you believe LinkedIn, AI is everywhere. Not using it yet? Too bad. You’re already years behind. A few years ago, it was an exception to use AI in daily work. Now, it seems to be a commodity.
Also in tech, it’s used a lot these days. Over two years ago, GitHub introduced GitHub Copilot. A tool for programmers to let AI write your code. You tell it what you want, and it magically creates all the code you. Yet, we don’t use AI to write code.
Let’s be clear upfront. We’ve got nothing against AI. It’s fascinating you can generate images from plain text. It’s great you can speed up your dull, daunting administrative work. It’s magnetic that you can get super accurate recommendations based on a small paragraph.
It’s all of that. Yet, we don’t use AI to build software for our customers. The reason is simple: it is cheating.
It’s like high-school cheating. The kind of cheating when you forget to learn for an exam. By cheating, you tried to pass it. You might make it through your exam, but you’ve learned nothing from it. It is cheating on yourself.
The problem with using AI to build software is that it skips understanding.
The core of our business is to give adequate, actionable, and accurate advice to run a successful e-commerce business. We ship custom-made, high-quality software used to scale sustainably and go beyond standard expectations.
To excel in what we do, we need to understand. We can’t be experts if we copy and paste. You have to comprehend why something works. How it works. Why it does not work. How it might work.
When we would copy and paste, we would miss that.
Plus, using AI, means you can never keep up. You’re always in a passive position whereby you follow. Anything AI does is based on the past. Yes, it can hallucinate about the future, but that’s beside the point. Using AI means you always follow and never lead.
Can we do that to our customers? We don’t think so.
The e-commerce space can be very competitive. You need to constantly adapt. Be on top of your game. You need to understand. To emphatize. To comprehend. We need to understand. That way, we help e-commerce companies to become their best selves, to grow sustainably, and to blow past customer expectations.
AI has its place in the world of e-commerce. We just don’t use it to build software.