The Person Least Qualified to Build an AI Company

If you asked a tech bro to describe the person least qualified to build an AI company you'd get something close to me. Thirty plus years in communications, no computer science degree and I'm fifty-six.

I've had all of that said to my face, more or less politely (often less!), on the assumption that the technology is the hard part and everything else is soft stuff you bolt on afterwards.

Yet everything that has happened in AI so far says it's the other way round, because every failed rollout I've seen failed, faltered at least in part, for a communications reason, where nobody explained why, or what it meant for Wednesday afternoon, or that using AI like Google or for writing the odd email isn't being AI fluent.

People are given a login, maybe a seminar or a webinar link, and then it goes quiet and they're left working out for themselves whether this thing has arrived to help them or replace them. Which is exactly why you cannot train your way out of it, you have to talk your way through it.

It's also why communications belongs in every AI programme as the thing you design the whole programme around rather than the launch email that goes out the week before.

Which is what my thirty-odd years is for, getting a message out of one head and into another without it going wrong on the way, and it turns out that's one of the biggest jobs here too.

The tool I reach for most is plain English, not because I'm dumbing anything down but because I'm making it relevant, since complexity is where people give up and every piece of jargon gives an already overwhelmed person one more reason to decide this isn't for them.

I mean, "agentic workflows" sounds like something you'd need compliance sign-off for when, for most people, it's just automating a task they already do. And as for "forward-deployed engineer", words fail me. What that describes is someone who comes and sits with you while you work, which is roughly what Mackenzie and I have been doing for the past two years without the job title.

So anyway, hello, I'm Louise if we haven't met already. And I reckon the people who turn out to be most useful in all this might look a lot more like me than a founder in a Patagonia gilet.