Nothing Personal
To be fair, the tech world has always been like this -- a new trend appears, everyone picks up the same hammer, and suddenly everything starts looking like a nail. It’s new, it’s shiny, it’s where the money is.
However, AI is the first time when a major trend doesn’t spark any joy, and all the news around it feels incredibly tiresome. Maybe it’s just me, though, because of the fields I work in. Which begs the question: how do you keep building a career in tech when the whole industry seems to have gone south? And I'm not talking about Texas here like Mark Zuckerberg.
I don't think anybody cares about customers anymore, let alone customer support. Everything is just data now. When you build your company around A/B tests and tracking, you don't need to talk to your customer -- a chatbot, now rebranded as an AI assistant, will do.
Only a handful of companies still treat their customers like humans and offer real, human support. You can tell when it happens because you don't need to get through the long conversations with the AI assistants to get through to a human. Most others now dream of a future where AI assistants will reply to AI agents, and call it progress.
The privacy & compliance field has always leaned toward the legal side, but lately it’s been completely overtaken by lawyers. I think it happened as a knee-jerk reaction to what I mentioned above: when companies stop caring about people and their privacy, the only way to resist and confront them is to go legal, and to make it political. IAPP course and exam prices are outrageously high, and you also have to pay them just to maintain your certification. But why bother doing it now, if companies are hiring lawyers for most privacy roles anyway.
And I don’t think this takeover of the privacy field is a good thing. First, because I can’t stand legalese. Second, because we all know what happens when lawyers start shaping technology -- the ePrivacy Directive and those stupid cookie banners won’t let us forget it.
So, what do you do to earn a living if you’re not born with a silver spoon in your mouth? I don’t know.
This post is proudly sponsored by my midlife crisis.