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In today’s world, a superficial reading of tech newsletters and startup press releases leads one to believe we are on the cusp of a machine-driven society. Indeed, “Artificial Intelligence” and “Machine Learning” have become table-stakes marketing terms, with companies like Tesla (autopilot) and Google (duplex) leading the charge toward fully automated solutions to everyday problems. However, if you take a closer look at the technologies you see they are targeted to a specific type of problem (e.g. self-driving and speech emulation) and as such the underlying algorithms are tuned to be successful within those problem spaces. That by no means reduces the impressive results achieved, but the hype around these technologies has created a false belief that anything and everything can be automated. There's a big gap of understanding. 

Right now a lot of people are facing the challenges of working from home. For lenders this goes beyond the normal challenges of a full house of children, pets, and distractions. Monitoring a portfolio and performing credit analysis for new deals can be exceptionally painful without the usual workstation setup consisting of multiple monitors and ample screen space to access critical applications.

When I was handed the keys to the engineering organization at my previous company, I did what I knew: I jumped in head first and focused on the architecture and code. And I thought I was doing a great job. We successfully scaled the platform to handle a massive influx of traffic, delivered features (mostly) on time, and had several extremely satisfied enterprise customers. But there was always a sense of misalignment and distrust in our executive meetings. We struggled to agree on strategy and priority. Requirements were ambiguous and couldn’t be clarified. Delivery expectations were kept hidden and artificially padded without collaboration. We were successful, but something was preventing us from becoming a well-oiled machine.

Somewhere above the Atlantic Ocean, I took a break from writing this blog to watch The Black Panther (for a third time). There is a scene where T’Challa objects to his sister Shuri’s newly-developed technology because the technology that he was already using worked well enough for him. Shuri’s response was, “just because something works does not mean it cannot be improved.”