One of the annoying things about writing about AI projects is that the writing
goes out of date so very quickly. It does make interesting reading, though, seeing how far things have come and how quickly. Projects that would have taken 6 months were only taking a week or two a year ago, thanks to the help of AI. Now they take days, and are demonstrably better.
From a business owner’s point of view, it’s quite empowering and exciting while at the same time creating a lot of uncertainty. As my career has hinged on inflection points like this (the birth of the home computer, then the PC, then the Internet boom), I’m genuinely excited about the opportunities. Yes the internet is filling up with AI ‘slop’, but those of us using AI as a tool to do a job are finding that we can realise some of the ideas that we’ve had in the past that weren’t worth the risk of spending the time and money to develop.
My two daughters, who are looking for careers in the TV & Film Industry are very anti-AI as they feel like it’s an existential threat to their art. The reality is less black-and-white than they think, but that’s youthful idealism for you. They will at least approve of the fact that I’m writing this by hand and not by Claude.
In my day job at The Very Good Email Company, we get a lot of technical questions from users when the answers are there on the website. Humans are lazy though, and often would rather just ask ‘someone’ than put in any effort trying to find the answers for themselves. I’ve probably mentioned before that a lot of the job of technical support is googling stuff for people. We’ve now got to the point where we ask AI to do that bit for us and give us a nice polite answer that we can pass on to the customer after double-checking it. It also avoids BOFH (Bastard Operator From Hell) syndrome. You know, that techie who sits in a dark room and growls at anyone who dares ask him a question he deems as stupid or beneath him.
On this subject, I’d like to introduce you to my latest creation, Edwin Chat. His job is to be trained on the contents of a website and other documents, and then be a helpful assistant. You can see him on my website and have a chat. He knows all about everything I’ve written here, but beware, this Edwin is trained to be a BOFH, so watch what you ask, or have fun arguing with him if you’ve got nothing better to do.
Edwin can do some seriously good work, particularly on websites with a lot of information. The AI behind him runs on a little box on our network. It was free (though the hardware to run it on was anything but), and was written by the Chinese, who stole a lot of data from the Americans (who stole the whole of human knowledge from the Internet), and worked out how to do things more efficiently because Donald Trump wouldn’t let them buy the fastest kit.
Edwin goes live on 1st September 2026. Until then, there may be many changes and no service guarantees, but feel free to sign up for an account – no credit card required, and free until October 1st. If you need help because it’s all too techie and confusing, message me and I’ll set you up with a demo so you can see how powerful it is.
Meanwhile, I think the AI boom is about to bust, so careful if you’re holding too many AI-related shares. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to destroy the world after all – at least not before Donald does! That’s my prediction anyway.