Gen AI and Dashboards
Cast in this unlikely role \ Ill-equipped to act
There's a lot of talk about Generative AI, and I don't doubt that it will eventually be a world-changing technology, but my experience with it so far has been similar to my experience with using dashboards.
Both claim they will save me time
Both take a bit to get familiar with the interface before I start seeing results I expect
Both are good for quick checks on things
If I try to use either in a way that my reputation depends on, it’s faster to do the work myself than to take the output and do all the necessary checks and adjustments
To be slightly more specific on this last point, the last time I used Gen AI it was to help me with some writing. By the time I adjusted the output to something I could actually share, I think it would have been faster to write it myself. The last (few) time(s) I used a dashboard, I wasn’t able to use the base visualization, nor could I get the data out in a useful way, so I ended up pulling everything from SQL anyway.
The images it can create are pretty cool, though!
I wonder if there is a similar hype-cycle with generative AI just like other data related technologies of the past. It wasn't too long ago that the hype was all about "Big Data" and before that it was "Data Mining". Maybe there's others out there and I agree with you. There's no question that generative AI has the potential to do some pretty cool things that could add value, however it won't be something you can just slap onto any existing platform. Like any tool, it will work best when it is linked to the right problem to be solved.