This is where you need multiple levels of management so that you can create a different reality for the investors than for the engineers and then just chalk it up to “communication difficulties”.
The CEO needs to tell the investors that the company is all-in on AI. At the same time, the CEO needs to tell the engineers to use AI judiciously to support real customer needs, but not go hog-wild with it where it doesn’t make sense. This sort of situation, where you need to tell one group one set of facts to get them to act but another group a different set of facts, is fairly common in business (and politics).
The way big corporations handle this is to have many layers of management and a very diffuse set of responsibilities so that nobody is outright “lying”, they’re just interpreting what they’ve been told in a way that makes sense relative to their job responsibilities. The way startups handle it is to lie and hope that by the time they get caught, their results speak for themselves.
The CEO needs to tell the investors that the company is all-in on AI. At the same time, the CEO needs to tell the engineers to use AI judiciously to support real customer needs, but not go hog-wild with it where it doesn’t make sense. This sort of situation, where you need to tell one group one set of facts to get them to act but another group a different set of facts, is fairly common in business (and politics).
The way big corporations handle this is to have many layers of management and a very diffuse set of responsibilities so that nobody is outright “lying”, they’re just interpreting what they’ve been told in a way that makes sense relative to their job responsibilities. The way startups handle it is to lie and hope that by the time they get caught, their results speak for themselves.