After I got married, I locked myself into a personal hell for nearly a year.
I wanted to fully appreciate the flavor of pizza in Naples on my honeymoon. So, instead of a nice lemon sorbet, I chose abstinence to cleanse my palate of my beloved New York pizza. How romantic… to put my favorite person and food in one place!
As a pizza lover, I can’t help seeing slices in my work. Pizza, like software, can be mass produced or custom built with premium ingredients.
Over the past few years, our software has tasted a little like frozen pizza. You can tell it’s mass produced. Producers make their profit on volume.
If we’re lucky, we have spent the time and money to configure mass produced software, so it’s custom-delivered, like a pizza box to our doorsteps. But still this version doesn’t customize down to the user level. We force our users to fit their way of working into the box we provide them with.
On the other end of the spectrum, a top pizza chef sources their ingredients from farm to table, down to the wheat they use to make the pizza dough. They take high profits on low quantities, charging us for the perfect slice and for the privilege of witnessing their magic onsite.
Nowadays, we all have access to the AI ingredients that create custom intelligence and automation. As pizza lovers, we know what’s a good slice. As experts in our own fields, we know what great work looks like.
As individuals, we need to cross the divide between pizza lover and pizza chef. Learn what AI can do. Instruct it.
Make our work richer, faster, and better than the frozen packaged software we’ve been eating for years.
As leaders, support the chefs and watch the kitchen carefully. A pizza restaurant that customizes every single pie is sure to fail. The restaurant that takes all the profits is the one that selects which pies to offer based on what customers actually want, then equips its chefs with the best ingredients and equipment to make them.
The gentle aroma of tomatoes, oregano, and mozzarella drifts toward me. As my smiling face bites into the perfect chef-made slice, I know that frozen pizza is going to be harder to swallow.
AI is bringing the farm-to-table experience to software. There’s no going back.
Take a bite!
Originally published on LinkedIn
