Rob Stevenson

New Article, possibly my last for a while. I've spent two years figuring out how to make a two-person law firm compete with teams twenty times its size using AI. This is the closest I'll come to explaining how. Also explains why I can type “plz fix” and get back work product that reads like I spent three hours on it, when really I spent three hundred hours building the system that did.

Goed verhaal

Globalisation has gone too far. There’s no way someone that lives in Kenya should even know this type of Brit exist

AI is making CEOs delusional

Scott Adams has passed away. May he rest in peace

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told everyone it would "10x productivity." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the usage reports. 47 people had opened it. 12 had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds. Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "AI enablement." I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're "AI-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT. I said we needed "enterprise-grade security." He asked what that meant. I said "compliance." He asked which compliance. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "career development conversation." He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "saved 40,000 hours." I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. "Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot." The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000. But this time we'll "drive adoption." Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "investing in AI." Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

Day in the life of a private equity associate: - wake up at 6:15am to an email from a VP asking to change the shade of orange in the bar chart on page 47 of the deck you worked on till 2 am (there is no bar chart in the deck) - open the model; spend 45 minutes trying to remember why column CX is linked to a tab called “temp_calc” - spend 2 hours figuring out why the “temp_calc” tab is REF'd. Rebuild the model - get asked to “pull some comps” -- the only usable comp is a micro-cap based in Lithuania. Use it anyway. - receive QofE draft. EBITDA is now 17 different numbers and none match your model - revise the model for the third time today because someone wants to “see what happens if revenue is 2% lower but margins somehow go up” - receive late-night email from the MD: “Let’s rethink the angle here” (there is no angle: the deal only works if EBITDA doubles in year one) - swear you’re going to reorganize your model tabs tomorrow (you will not) - sleep (briefly) Did I miss anything?

1 & 2 are difficult. Particularly if you want to outperform relative to median industry growth rates and margins. 3 requires strong deal sourcing, discipline, and integration capability. Relying exclusively on 4 & 5 is a losing strategy. Can’t be relied upon.