Enough with the AI FOMO, go slow-mo, says Domo CDO
theregister.com
theregister.com
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OK
And I bet I could build within 5 working day a Saas replacement of Domo.
There is no moat anymore.
Oh really? Then why is syncthing (for example), still so much harder to use than dropbox?
I'm only being half-flippant here.
Right now I sort of trust Dropbox, but considering how much enshittification it has already undergone relative to its original mission statement, the company could do any number of things to lose that trust in a hurry. Someday they will, probably, and I won't be able to do anything about it except complain...
... except that's no longer true. Which is awesome.
I tried it for a while but eventually left it behind because it's just not particularly helpful. You practically have to draw the rest of the owl before it can work well, and at that point you can use any circle.
I don't believe LLMs make SAAS useless, but there are a subset of SAAS companies that AI truly does obviate. Among them are companies like DOMO, whose business model is best described as selling the fantasy of the "data-driven" org to leadership. They floated off the fumes of yesterday's hype. It's kind of painful to see how they're trying to inject themself into this cycle.
also what – chief design officer and futurist for DOMO?? what do they do? sorry to be a dick about it but a quote like "why aren't people more resentful that these companies have pushed this technology upon them" lacks a lot of self awareness lol.
Utah has a bit of a thing for "received knowledge", as the predominate culture tends to prime egos for prophetic wisdom. Add elitist competition with your local peers to the mix and you won't have to look far to find some...creative titles.
No mo' AI FOMO, go slow-mo, crows Domo CDO
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Whomever.
I have worked with old fashioned neural networks, deep learning, and now LLM-specific deep learning: wonderful technology, but over hyped, and advice to go a little slowly, with firm use cases that are financially viable is great advice!
A bunch of frivolous projects that fail sounds to me like a pretty good way to learn how far a new technology can be trusted.
If you're considering putting AI into something load bearing you either need a engineer who has not been participating so they can say "no" or one who has made 15 failed AI projects so they can say "maybe". The very worst case is to pressure somebody who doesn't know the technology very well into saying "yes".
> ...learn how far a new technology can be trusted
> Starting with business needs first is essential
But the reality is that for many end consumers of software, it's not a good experience to use janky software that changes behaviors, flows, and screens on a whim now because product can.
I think AI has had a negative effect on product teams; I can see all pretense of thoughtful design and execution after understanding the customer being thrown out the window and leaving a much worse end-user experience as designs and capabilities shift around without foresight and product teams "feel" their way through.
If somebody is shipping the prototypes, that's a problem. I was just speaking up for the utility of playing around as a necessary part of learning your tools.
I have been in meetings where the top item is ensuring security of XYZ llm component, and after we've shown its inherently not something secureable from what the product requirements are then those product requirements are discarded.
For many of these companies the entire thing is a smoke and mirrors game to just get more money, they have little to no commitment to ... anything really.
Outside a small bubble within Silicon Valley and the finance ecosystem funding it, I’d say most folks are increasingly fed up with AI.
It’s a very noticeable shift these last 6 months. The mood went from excited, to just annoyed at all the slop and folks using AI as a half-baked easy button vs doing real deep value-add thought.
Business is also noticing that the ROI simply isn’t there and a lot written about this. That doesn’t bode well for AI providers that need to massively increase prices to make the math work on their business models.
The world inside of the AI bubble seems largely ignorant of the mood shift underway, which suggests interesting times are ahead.
I speak to people who work at the upper echelons across various industries regularly and whether you want to believe it or not idc - the management are desperately trying to push AI but it just doesn’t add much value to what they do. At best it’s just a really good search engine across internal data. Many of these places already had things called macros in place so there’s barely any value add.
Even within SV there are still luddites who sometimes type out code, in mid 2026!!!
Although they know perfectly well what happened to their search / personal data, but they still don't want to see the obvious
Funny, I see HN as having a high concentration of anti-AI comments and general AI doubt. Yours included.
The vibe among less technical people I talk to has a negative sentiment about AI and AI companies, but largely because they see AI as more effective and capable. They think it’s coming for their job and way of life and they don’t like that.
If AI is coming for people’s jobs and it’s more effective, the management of firms across multiple industries should reflect that by firing lots of people right now. Why wait? Collect the extra cash flows today given future expectations of technological progress. Who says no to more money? Lmfao.
Or… perhaps they don’t quite stand all that much behind that claim.
Moreover ‘less technical’ means what exactly? I referenced people who are senior managers who are trying to wedge AI where they can. Who are you referencing?
"It’s worth taking a moment to really watch how [AIs] work, as they are working on some relatively lengthy task for you. It reminds me of bumper bowling [1]; link to a short video showing what it is. The AIs bang along all our bumpers; failing compiles, failing tests, failing integrations, error messages, all the bumpers we’ve built into our engineering process, and in the end they get a good result. But that good result is as much a result of all the solid engineering processes we have installed as anything else, because the AI without those protections rolls into the gutter relatively quickly. In those fields where the bumpers can’t be built as easily or in as great a quantity as we can have them, that’s what happens with the AIs.
"... it’s not that “programmers are awesome”, it’s that our domain is amenable to having all these bumpers in the first place."
I can think of bumpers for other domains, but not in the quantity we have in our space. Plus there's things like accounting, where "accounting" already is the bumper, having an AI banging into the accounting bumpers is much more concerning than a syntax error on compile is for us. Coding AIs would be nearly useless if the bumpers weren't there, and I think that's where a lot of other domains end up with when it comes to AI.
If you want to see what I mean, watch a longer coding process in your AI, notice the first place it bangs into one of the bumpers I'm talking about, and then imagine how valuable the AI would be if instead it didn't realize that it banged into a bumper, continued on obliviously, and then went off into ever-more-fantastic flights of fancy with no connection to reality. Such an AI would be too hazardous to use. I think that's the experience of almost every other field right now.
Well... except that it actually hasn't. A handful of people are saying "yeah we're getting huge gains, it's unreal". But most devs here talk about how it's at best a modest speedup, and at worst slows them down. So even for programming, the thing they are supposedly good at, LLMs aren't actually that good.
There's a lot of overlap between people who cannot stand the AI boosters, don't want a data center built anywhere near them, are sick of the slop, and still use a chatbot for some stuff.
I don't think this is hypocrisy. I don't think it's a contradiction at all.
It suggests that people actually like natural language interfaces where they make sense and the price is reasonable. What they don't like is the rhetoric, behavior, impact on electricity prices, insistence on cramming it into places where it doesn't belong, layoffs, threats, and general obnoxiousness of the people pushing it and their general milieu.
Which makes perfect sense.
Both of those things did transform life & culture but mostly to the benefit of their makers. People now expect the same from AI and for better or worse most of the CEOs are not even pretending this time. The most they do is some vague hope that it'll all workout magically somehow.
Got any examples you can share?
Is your pay scaling in a similar manner? Or have you just raised the floor for what's expected of you?
did you generate 10x more income in the time AI changed your life? What is the projection you are doing?
>Why aren't people more resentful that these companies have pushed this technology upon them
They are.
Yea, currently the thinking seems to be, if we're spending money on tokens, the work is inherently worth it. However, this clearly cannot always be the case - one of the more difficult things I've worked on lately is tracking token usage to measurable work outputs, but measuring work output reliably is a notoriously difficult problem historically in tech, and opens a lot of uncomfortable conversations.
"EFF dinks HP Inc finks in rinky-dink ink stink"
https://www.theregister.com/off-prem/2016/09/27/eff-dinks-hp...
mid to large sized companies always had to man-power to produce anything they could imagine and AI is not going to change that.
what will change is that your paid product will become free because someone got annoyed at a bug with your paid product, remade it with AI and made it opensource or for a fraction of the price.
the floor has been raised while the ceiling will stay relatively the same, most medium to large companies were already hovering around the ceiling so at the end of the day the framework that these companies were built on is crumbling and that's what should make them afraid, not the fact that they're 'missing out' on AI.
"BoHo go bye-bye for JoJo Pogo? That's a no-go, bro.”
Or:
"We have a sitch in the kitch. It's a dishwash ish."
Or:
"You know full well once I become Baxter's bride, I'm trading board rooms for bedrooms, watches for swatches and deadlines for bedtimes."
Or:
"I would love to take down Hippopopalous and finally topple the acropolis of monstrous hypocrisy that ensconces us.”
The desperation for commodity services and second-tier products to stay relevant is widespread. See also intercom.com "The only helpdesk designed for the AI Agent era".
FTFY the headline for you