Gitwit's AI Manifesto

Democratizing New Powers and Bumping Up Against the Investigation and Imagination Constraints

In the Industrial Revolution, mechanical machines came for our bodies and made them obsolete, but in this replacement we became as a whole unimaginably and exponentially more powerful. 

Our digital evolution is turning a corner into something more of a revolution where digitized experiences and flows are coming for our minds – and they offer an even more powerful new way to become much more than who we are.

Innovation changes the way we are human. It can enhance who we are and better ways to live; it can also de-humanize us, make it harder to become the best people with the best lives.

Change has always been, and always will be, our predictably unpredictable constant.

Great products and companies get built amongst significant change, while the same change often takes down the established great companies.

In just a matter of two years, an erstwhile niche second-rate chip manufacturer company NVIDA has increased in value by $2.5T, the equivalent of the GDP of France.

What makes AI different from the world wide web transformation is the ability to use natural language not just to create new business that can reach people directly, but to alter the work we do in our professional and personal lives.

Instead of a sacred priesthood of developers and engineers leading the way, LLMs are democratizing the capability to build and personalize technological applications to nearly anyone. 

The mass adoption of ChatGPT was the fastest in history, enabling every person with a connection to the internet to interact with generative AI.

The costs and time to build drop precipitously from years, to months, to weeks, and now days – even hours in some cases.

We’re in the early phases where the highlights of AI innovation mostly fall into the “that’s a nice party trick” category rather than revolutionizing an experience or a workflow. 

The constraints and bottlenecks to innovation are no longer the usual suspects – capital, technical talent – but older more fundamental ones, such as imagination working hand-in-hand with the ability to find and solve real problems for specific people.

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No Experience and Moment Untouched

The newfound approachability of building technology is why companies across the world are feeling two pressures: FOMO and FOBO. FOMO is the idea that others are finding ways to use AI to drive meaningful profitability via innovation or efficiency and we are going to miss out. 

At the company level and the employee level lurks FOBO – Fear Of Becoming Obsolete. There is something deeply existential about AI on several levels. How will work change? Can our company maintain relevance and value? What will become of me if I can’t figure out how to innovate successfully?

There is just as much fear of what could happen as optimism for fresh and potentially highly profitable opportunities. 

AI now is just as much a mental construct as it is a rapidly evolving group of machine-based technologies aided and abetted by a linguistically accessible interface.  

Because AI is now a shared mindset as well, it is leading to a mass movement of companies and all their employees being charged to rethink who they are and what they do…each and every day. “What have you done or are you thinking about doing with AI today?”   

Will AI change some things? Check. Will AI change many things? High probability.

Will AI change most things? If it’s like the Industrial Revolution, it will rewrite and rewire our brains, biology, daily life, work, relationships, societal organization, who creates value and profits from it, and the pace of innovation.

Tomorrow may look less like today than ever before in human history.

No person, business, or organization untouched. No activity, task, or moment untouched.

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The Possibilities and Problems of the Great AI Rethink

There’s the most potential ever to develop technology to alter the most micro-aspects of our day in our most local contexts. So much so, that the gap between an idea today and a new reality tomorrow is disappearing. 

In other words, re-inventing how we work or how a product or marketing experience works is possible nearly anywhere. This low or no gravity, constraint-free atmosphere is itself the new problem. 

While it’s often easy to speculate a radically altered future with AI, it becomes much more challenging to re-imagine it in the present day with a rapidly and radically evolving set of tools and applications. How do you rethink and reinvent in this cyclonic churn of creative chaos? 

It is not a big surprise that most companies are failing to make progress with AI, other than the at-hand, off-the-shelf LLM tools on offer. The killer application inside a company’s walls is not being tackled or developed despite the charge to “rethink our business with AI.”

The ‘big rethink’ just might be the obstacle in the way. We’re pressuring ourselves to think about a farther-out future devoid of real-world contexts and this disconnects us from the narrow details of work flows and customer experiences.  

AI the technology gets all the buzz, but it is at the level of the human in their daily flow that is the secret to unlocking real value. And, it’s the human aspect that is not getting the attention within companies because most companies are not built to be obsessed or have the capability to understand the human experience. 

The ‘great AI rethink’ is actually an exercise in thinking bigger about what could and should be different for human workers and the ways they add value to customers of the products, services, and experiences they conceive, build, and deliver. It starts with reimagining the possible (telescoping) so the here-and-now can be examined and reconceived through idealized end states with the eye for making the most progress today (the microscope.)   

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Gitwit is Built for the Great AI Rethink

‍Learning is rethinking – it’s constant and courageous when it is core to a person or organization. That’s because learning is humbling; there is no build up of ego, dogmatism, or certainly over confidence. We’re doubters who don’t get stuck in doubt or become skeptical naysayers. 

While learning for us is about achieving a more insightful, frame-shifting understanding of what already exists, it also includes a continuous extrapolation of these new understandings in order to envision new possibilities and experiment with these. 

It’s creative exploration combined with urgent, informed action. It’s curiosity about if the impossible is actually just that, impossible, with a guiding belief that it probably isn’t and we’re the ones to prove the world wrong. 

As humans, we have the capability to learn quickly in order to adapt to an unpredictable and changing environment. With the advent of democratized AI, change will likely be more unpredictable than at any moment in human history. Change is changing. The first order effects will lead to second order, third order, and layered effects that will alter our work and home lives in unforeseen ways. 

In this world of accelerating and unpredictable change, an organization built entirely to learn, discover better problems to solve, ideate a quantity and diversity of new approaches, rapidly build and test new things, bring them to the world and get them the attention they deserve, is especially equipped to thrive in the 'great AI rethink.' 

As the ultimate learning machine, Gitwit combines with equal focus and capability both the human and technological expertise to lead the way in developing successful solutions for companies and in developing new companies to achieve outsized experiential, efficiency, and profitability gains during the AI transformation.

We’ve always been a ‘question every assumption each and every day’ company. For us, today needs to be rethought from yesterday. What works today in creating user experiences and marketing communications won’t be as effective tomorrow. This is an undeniable truth that we refuse to ignore or sweep under the rug because it’s unsettling, but instead embrace as an energizing core philosophy and express through our key habits, especially in our use of creative collaboration to fashion every next step in the details of projects.

So we begin again and again – we’re the expert beginners – informed by the past, but never captured or determined by it. As professional learners, we take each morsel of new knowledge we discover through our engagement with people and the world, and devise all-new creative next steps to fearlessly drive us toward realizing end-user goals and business outcomes. 

We never let “how we’ve done it in the past” or “we’ve never done that before” get in the way of fearlessly pursuing the better ways. There is no template to rely on, only using our diverse talents and perspectives as a collaborative team working hand-in-hand in a constantly revised and evolving creative process to get the right people, at the right time, doing the right things. 

The way forward is to do more than ride a wave or catch the tailwind in just the right spot – winds change direction now so fast. It’s to become an evolutionary force and contributor in our own right. The winds of change are ours to create, not just navigate. We won’t just be the best at adapting, we will build, launch, and continually iterate and grow new things that cause the world to adapt to what we are doing. 

Our “AI strategy” is to realize that the entire ethos of this company was designed for this moment and that our approach to creativity is more relevant and needed than ever. It’s a doubling down on the core values that we have had for nearly ten years. Core values that demand us to get and stay as close to the target audiences and users as possible; to challenge prevailing assumptions and approaches; and to use the time when we know little about something to discover new insights that those with experience can no longer see.

The 'great AI rethink' isn’t something we need to prepare for, we’ve been preparing.

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