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Why AI Won’t Change The World

Where’s the beef?

Allan Milne Lees
10 min readJan 21, 2025
Image credit: 123RF

One of the formative experiences of my long life came more than thirty years ago when I joined a then-hot database software company in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company had achieved initial success despite a complete lack of any meaningful business plan nor any concept of what customers needed. By good fortune (but not intention), their database was slightly quicker than those of competitors when it came to storing and accessing data and by chance one of the salespeople talked to a technology buyer on Wall Street who realized that this slight speed advantage could be useful in gaining a slight competitive edge in computer-enabled trading. And so, within two years, the company had established itself as the go-to database for Wall Street.

From there it slowly expanded into other niches, but always without any kind of plan. As a result, when we ran a profitability analysis shortly after I joined, we discovered that 90% of the company’s revenues were being generated by a mere 20 customers worldwide and that more than half the customers were losing the company money because of insanely high support costs.

Meanwhile the company’s technical cofounder had become obsessed with object-oriented technologies. This was a major bit of a hype back in the mid-1990s and consequently he believed (thanks to never listening to…

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.

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