AI-First Company Memos

Whatever happened to "show, don't tell"? Other productivity boosters certainly didn't need such memos; they were naturally adopted because the benefits were unambiguous. There were no "IDE-first company memos" or "software framework-first company memos"; devs organically picked these up because the productivity gains were immediately self-evident.

It's so sad to see some of these companies completely fail their AI-first communication [1], when they would just get so much from "We think AI can transform the way we work. We're giving you access to all these tools, please tell us what works and what doesn't". And that would be it.

[1] there was a remote universe where I could see myself working for Shopify, now that company is sitting somewhere between Wipro and Accenture in my ranking.

HubSpot CTO was very vocal about how AI is changing everything and how he is supporting by offering the domain chat.com to OpenAI etc. I say was because it has toned down quite a bit. I always thought HubSpot will transform into a true AI CRM given how invested the CTO was in the space from the early days.

Now the stock is down from $800+ to $200+ and the whole messaging has changed. The last one I saw on LinkedIn was "" No comment on the HubSpot stock price.

But, I strongly agree with this statement:

"...I don't see companies trusting their revenue engine to something vibe-coded over a weekend." ""

The stock dip is likely because of the true AI native CRMs being built and coming to market, but why couldn't HubSpot take that spot given the CTOs interest in the space.

I work for a large tech company, and our CTO has just released a memo with a new rubric for SDEs that includes "AI Fluency". We also have a dashboard with AI Adoption per developer, that is being used to surveil the teams lagging on the topic. All very depressing.

A friend of mine is an engineer of a large pre-IPO startup, and their VP of AI just demanded every single employee needs to create an agent using Claude. There were 9700 created in a month or so. Imagine the amount of tech debt, security holes, and business logic mistakes this orgy of agents will cause and will have to be fixed in the future.

edit: typo

Fiverr CEO goes on a pretty dark rant about how people who don’t upskill and convert to AI workflows will have to change professions, etc.

Then concludes his email with:

> I have asked Shelly to free up time on my calendar next week so people can have conversations with me about our future.

I assume Shelly is an AI, and not human headcount the CEO is wasting on menial admin tasks??

Same here in LATAM. We are also an AI-First company now. No customer-first, or product-first, or data-driven (I actually liked the idea behind being data-driven). All the code must be AI-generated by the end of Q1. All the employees must include at least one AI-adoption metric or project in their goals.

seems to be a pattern:

[Company that's getting disrupted by AI: Fiverr, Duolingo]: rush to adopt internal AI to cut costs before they get undercut by competition

[Company that's orthogonal: Box, Ramp, HFT]: build internal tools to boost productivity, maintain 'ai-first' image to keep talent

[Company whose business model is AI]: time to go all in

I like to think if someone can't be bothered to write something, I can't be bothered to read it.

The Klarna guy:

>The misconceptions about Klarna and AI adoption baffle me sometimes.

>Yes, we removed close to 1,500 micro SaaS services and some large. Not to save on licenses, but to give AI the cleanest possible context.

If you remove all your services...

I get ai-adjacent dev teams going all in, as they're equipped to deal with the hard edges, but this is brutal for everyone else. Like Frank in collections is just trying to make sure people get paid, not worry about whatever it means to be "prompt injected".

Reminds me a bit of the old f*ckedcompany website, where internal layoff notices and other insider gossip got posted.

That Fiverr one seems especially cold somehow. I guess it lines up with their business model though.

If you hire good people and set proper incentives they will figure out the best way to do something. If leadership has to direct employees to use AI it's a bad sign. If it were a huge boon to productivity, you won't need to force people to use it.

May I suggest directly hosting the images and text instead of embedding the x and linked in posts.

If the person who wrote this is reading, many of us block tracking in our browsers and all we see for each of those X embeds is

"X trackers and content blocked

Your Firefox settings blocked this content from tracking you across sites or being used for ads."

Screenshots don't track me so they would be ok.

The trap for many companies is that as everyone automate with AI, their competitive advantage erodes, as they prove that a few centralized models can run the businesses.

What are the trenches in businesses in 2030, purely ownership over physical assets and energy?

What are the AI-never companies doing? May be a useful comparison. Is the AI work actually improving the bottom line, or is it being used to assuage noisy shareholders that think AI is a hack for infinite profit?

> Within weeks, CEOs across industries posted their own versions. The AI-first memo became a genre. Here they all are.

That may be all the publicly-posted ones, but I'm skeptical. They have 11.

There were a lot more internal memos.

This reads like they don't want AI, they just want tooling. More, better tooling. AI is just a scapegoat/easy out for writing more tooling that makes them more efficient.

Isn’t there tons more, like the note from Andy Jassy at Amazon and the CEO at Airwallex etc? Maybe you can use an ai agent to find all the other big examples? ;-)

Its easier to adopt AI when starting from scratch or code base is well maintained.

This is "AGI".

Also notice how almost all the stocks of these companies except Meta who have announced AI-first initiatives are at best flat or down but more than 20% YTD.

What does that tell you?

People have always resisted change especially one that modifies the way they work. They’d rather work on the same thing for life. To get them to adopt new tools you need to do this stuff.

And yes, people did resist IDEs (“I’m best with my eMacs” - no you weren’t), people resisted the “sufficiently smart compiler”, and so on. What happened was that they were replaced by the sheer growth in the industry providing new people who didn’t have these constraints.

The software defined storage company croit.io announced it in their Workation in May 2023. AI is just another tool and people have to understand that it's not going away. As a company, you still need people to make use of this tool.

"Cool. I quit."

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