Comment by simianwords
14 days ago
I couldn’t read the full article but it raises a good point about using AI for dashboards and creating charts. Lots of people work in the jobs in which the requirement is to literallly pull the data and create nice looking dashboards.
This job is clearly going to be modified in some way.
We finally have a legitimate way to query data using natural language and create dashboards. I don’t know what the point of learning sql is now - at least for olap users.
Its funny though, if we unpack it more and add little more exaggeration to see where future might be going:
* we don't need to know how to write the code, because AI can write code.
* we don't need dashboards, because AI can connect to db directly and generate dashboards on-demand
* we don't need utility SaaS, like managing your Google Ads, Meta Ads. Because AI can connect to them directly and manage your ads
* we don't need many other services, because AI can do them
Only moat seems to be in the platforms with large user base and inertia or things run on top of them: Gmail, Google Ads, Reddit, Instagram, MS Office, AWS/Azure/GCP and etc,.
I’ve been thinking about this but one moat can be trust itself.
If every product can be made easily, what’s left is relation with the customers. Some companies rely on not just the core code or physical product but rather on the overall ecosystem of customers, service and other things. Here, the alignment between all of them is what matters because for certain products to work, you need all parties to jointly trust in the system. For example what makes Uber work is not only the quality of product but that all parties - drivers, riders all jointly trust that the system works.
A company has moat if they can earn this trust.
I have an employee that’s been setting up ops dashboards manually for 30 years
He set all ours up from scratch in a week with assistants and he’s never been happier cause he knows exactly what to do and what the outputs should be
He can still teach juniors the important parts and walk through how to use Prometheus and Grafana etc…