Dreadnought Holiday

I didn't think I'd ever see the Simpsons "you can actually pinpoint the exact moment his heart breaks in two" meme in real life until Mr Snake Oil asked our annual legal spend. We gave him a suitably large figure. His little eyes lit up. Finally - real imaginary savings to be made! We then gently pointed out we were a law firm. When we engage legal professionals it's because *we can't fucking do it ourselves* and the regulators would be mightily pissed off if we tried. And we pass the fee on.

Similarly, if the person who has been grinning through your twenty minute pitch about how AI is transformational for sales because of its ability to identify and understand potential customers you've never heard of asks "did you use your product to research us?"... There's no good answer here, because you know who else has a big smile on their face? Sharks. And there's about to be blood in the water. "...because that's really not relevant to this company or our model." Oops. There it is.

Honestly, the whole thing has been a colossal waste of time even before it was kiboshed by HR getting excited about the possibilities of it generating hundreds of emails for them (at which point *everybody* switched to "kill it with fire"). I only wish I'd brought popcorn.

"This assumes an improvement of 1%." "That's far too low. What would it be if it were 5%?" "Oh, great! That would really deliver a benefit!" "Well that three thousand pounds of extra income is certainly going to be transformational..." Reader, I had to turn my camera off so I could laugh properly. Be cruel not to.

And for the love of God under no circumstances say "let's use our AI to create a business plan for implementing AI". A) it's incredibly presumptuous B) you've forgotten there are at least two finance people on the call who have shot everything down so far and deeply resent being told AI can do their job better than they can C) holy fuck but can it not do this job better than they can D) the two finance people have somehow made your net benefit a negative number. How the fuck did that happen?

@tienelle@mendeddrum.org Microsoft! We don't get our time back, so it's officially cost us a fair bit, but as a team building exercise it's been unparalleled value...