Hacker Remix

Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?

109 points by throwaway778 4 days ago | 115 comments

I'm the lead software engineer at a company building a B2B hardware/software product in the US. Great team, great technology, great PMF and good progress on revenue targets. There are lots of opportunities for how to develop the product further. It's been an extremely hard scale-up but we are finally starting to see it pay off.

I'm struggling with the CEO being increasingly focussed on investing heavily in AI. I'm not opposed to using this tech at all – it's amazing, and we incorporate a variety of different ML models across our stack where they are useful. But this strategy has evolved to the point where we are limiting resource on key teams aligned with core business to invest in an AI team.

The argument seems to be that they've realized the only way to achieve the next round of funding is to be "AI-first". There is no product roadmap for what this looks like, or what features might be involved, or why we'd want to do it from a product point of view. Instead the reason is that this is the only way to attract a big series C round.

I'm not well-informed enough to know if this is the correct approach to scaling. Instead of working on useful, in-demand product features, it feels like we're spending a lot of time looking at a distant future that we'll struggle to reach if we take our eye off of the ball. Is this normal? Are other organizations going through the same struggle? For the first time in five years I feel completely out of my depth.

codingdave 4 days ago

From what I've seen, anyone giving you definitive answers is blowing smoke. I've seen teams go for AI, do it well, and succeed. I've also seen teams go for AI, f it up, and all get fired as the company shuts down.

The question is whether the key value of your product can benefit from the strengths of AI? If not, don't go there. If so, you then need to determine if your team can actually deliver an AI-driven vision that enhances the existing value prop. Again, if not, don't go there. If so, do it.

But from your description, your CEO is not asking those questions - they are asking, "How do we get more funding?" Which tells me that your CEO doesn't give a crap about building a product, they are just trying to make money and get some nice bullet points on their resume about the size of a company they led.

That puts you in the position of choosing whether you want to go on a VC-driven startup ride just to have the experience, or whether you want a product-driven role. People have their reasons for both directions, but if you want a product-driven role, you are out of alignment with your CEO and probably shouldn't work for them.

didgetmaster 3 days ago

There are too many stories out there of highly successful people who got that way by going 'all in' on some rising technology.

This causes too many company executives to think 'if we go all in on [latest trend] then the same thing will happen to us'. Very little thought is given to whether the latest thing is a good fit for what you are building.

When it is a good fit, things can really work to your advantage. When it is not, it can just be a monkey on your back.

owebmaster 3 days ago

To sum up what you said, some startups succeeded creating products and others did not, just like before LLMs. The majority of the failed ones are led by clueless CEOs trying to join the hype

josh2600 4 days ago

I came here to write this exact response.

Folks work in mission driven organizations. In organizations that are optimizing for dollars you see quality fall by the wayside.

Mission driven organizations that understand the levers of capital are the most enjoyable workplaces of my career.

You want a CEO who is customer obsessed, not a CEO who is maximizing for dollars in the bank at all costs.

It has to be mission first for a startup to be great, really for any critical endeavor.

babyent 3 days ago

Maybe it’s a PE backed company

scarface_74 4 days ago

Every for profit organization is optimizing for dollars, the next round of funding or to be an acquisition target. “Customer obsession” only goes as far as getting enough customers to be an attractive acquisition or another exit.

exceptione 4 days ago

This might be a frame of reference issue. There are quite some small-medium businesses with a founder who is able to have more concerns in scope than "maximize dollars - screw it".

scarface_74 4 days ago

Has that founder taken outside funding? If so, it doesn’t matter what their belief system is.

exceptione 4 days ago

I understand what you mean, but over here bootstrapping is the norm. Also funding can be boring loans from the bank, family loans, or business loans based on trust in the skills of the business owner.

So it doesn't always have to be an: you owe me the money, so I own you.

TheNewsIsHere 4 days ago

Exactly. Tech has become a place where “funding” has become synonymous with “find a VC to fund you”. Most businesses don’t go that route, and plenty of tech ones don’t either.

Savings, bank loans, lines of credit, private loans between people, local angel investors, and so on are how most businesses bootstrap.

I co-own a technology business that has never taken outside money (well, we do have a credit card) and I’m not really interested in doing that. I think VCs are more trouble than they’re worth because they’re so obsessed with growth that little else matters to them, and we’ve seen where that gets us in terms of customer relationships and product quality. And they always want just enough control to eventually oust executives they don’t agree with.

We’ve built our business up the old fashioned way: from a personal capital contribution from each co-founder and modeling pricing based on what the business needs. Clients who see value in that approach from their critical technology vendors are not impossible to find at all.

Without the runway of functionally blank checks, you do have to continually monitor your business model though.

scarface_74 4 days ago

Can you name one tech company of note that hasn’t gone that route? BaseCamp and who else?

bruce511 3 days ago

Your qualifying statement is found some heavy lifting.

First 'tech company' is a very narrow band. There are lots of companies that were founded to leverage technology, but which do not consider themselves 'tech' companies. We're, for example a services business, the service we provide happens to use tech we developed.

Second "of note" is very subjective. Do you mean billions of users? Global brand name? Thousands of workers? Because those are very high capital outcomes achieved either via long time (IBM?) or massive capital injection (which leads to very financial motivations.)

Of course there are zillions of my smaller 'less notable' businesses that exist all around you and me. You've never heard of the company I work for, but we're well known in our domain in our market. We've never taken outside investment, and we're free to make a lot of 'discretionary spending' that often serves a purpose other than increasing dividends.

For example we pay low-end workers (non techies) substantially more than market rate (aka minimum wage) because we belive in 'living wage' principles. That directly reduces profits, which we can do because the owners care about many things, and money is just one of them.

Of course the business has to be a business. Of course it has to make money. But money is like blood. You need it to live, but you don't live to make blood.

onli 4 days ago

Microsoft is listed often as example. Dell as well. Apple startet without VCs, but added one a bit later.

scarface_74 3 days ago

Microsoft and Apple were founded in the late 70s not exactly applicable in 2025 with a completely different landscape.

mattmanser 7 hours ago

GitHub, MailChimp, stack overflow, craigslist, Zoho, pluralsight. Just ask an ai.

Or do you want to shift goal posts again?

And it's totally applicable right now given the recent collapse of VC funding.

sofixa 4 days ago

> I've seen teams go for AI, do it well, and succeed.

Succeed based on what criteria? I struggle to think of a single product with "AI" that I'd call successful (excluding the already existing and established niches of recommendation algorithms and computer vision which have been rebranded AI and maybe are what you're referring to).

kadushka 5 hours ago

You wouldn’t call ChatGPT a successful product?

yencabulator 3 days ago

I'd guess "succeed" here == "VC gave them money".

duxup 4 days ago

Work with them on a product roadmap?

I've seen folks wanting big changes and we sit down and draw things up and surprisingly it looks like the old roadmap. Everyone is happy and I don't say anything about the similarities, and most importantly we're on the same page ;)

Sometimes when leadership asks for big changes, even when they say big changes, you might find if you get into the details it's not THAT big a change.

In the meantime don't let your mind run too wild assuming and worrying about what they might be asking for. I do that too, it's a developer thing I think, we start considering possibilities or even misused terminology and we get into a loop ;)

ivanmontillam 4 days ago

This is great advice.

> I've seen folks wanting big changes and we sit down and draw things up and surprisingly it looks like the old roadmap.

I've found myself doing this also. It also helps to reason through new nuances found on the same evidence, because we're more wise looking at the same data in the future, or in this case, in the present (looking from the past).

somesortofthing 4 days ago

Draw up the product roadmap such that you can claim maximum AI-ness while including as little of it as possible in the actual product. Sounds like the CEO doesn't have any technical objections to not using AI, he just wants the ability to raise on AI branding.

Include as much non-AI work as you can in the AI teams' projects, pitch an "AI efficiency initiative" that minimizes new spend on AI with the justification of other teams picking up the slack, talk up whatever ML you're already doing, etc.

RangerScience 4 days ago

“Made in America” == “Assembled in America out of offshore parts”, only with AI?

(Also, huh - I wonder if that’s actually directly doable; “assembled by AI out of programmed outputs”?)

xg15 2 days ago

> AI efficiency initiative

Don't forget to name it after a dog, too.

ahussain 4 days ago

It seems like it's worth taking some time to steel-man the AI argument, even if your CEO hasn't made it very well.

E.g. If you don't work on AI now, and AI models keep improving, how likely is it that a competitor who integrates AI well will eat your lunch? If it's >50%, it seems worth it to shift some focus to AI regardless of the series C round.

This post from a few days ago has some great tips on how to integrate AI _well_: https://koomen.dev/essays/horseless-carriages/

collingreen 4 days ago

This approach looks to me like a classic mistake of assuming all your potential paying users both are and want to be (these are different things!) power users. Similarly it might be suffering from the problem of living on the cutting edge and assuming everyone else is too.

I like the post and what it goes over. I agree with huge swaths of it, especially the misuse of ai tools right now. I don't agree that anyone doing it that way (like the gmail team called out over and over here) is either stupid or naive. I don't agree every consumer tool should become an agent building playground. I don't agree building said playgrounds are easy (I think it's much much harder to design a good agent building version of a product than a good product). I don't agree consumers want everything they use to work this way. I also think it ignores the very real problem of ai bullshitting and the handcuffs that puts on people using it for mission critical things like paying the mortgage.

Ironically I think this post falls into its own trap of not thinking about the next step. Yeah a really good email agent product as demod sounds great in a world where nothing works this way yet. However, a world where every product I use has to be re-engineered from scratch, with various unknown and non-customizable (and enshittifying) LLMs under it, with various training and fine tuning, unknown access to data, and no interop is the wood-frame horseless carriage the author is mocking. That would be a terrible situation worse than the current one.

Rethinking for a world of ai agents, it would be better if products empowered consumer agents instead of tried to supplant them. In THAT world products stay simple and just expose a bunch of tools and patterns that each consumer's custom agents can effectively use. Making that work well for your own product is actually viable AND helpful AND doesn't force your users to change their behavior if they don't want to. Anything I, the consumer, do to handle or prompt my own agent pays off across my entire ecosystem and investment can be focused on the right things by the right people (ie gmail should make email tools not agent tools).