Will AI change everything?
That question feels a little dated now, doesn’t it. If you work anywhere near business, technology or marketing, you know it already does.
So the question that makes me wonder is not “Will AI change everything,” but what it is becoming.
Just when I think I have started understanding it, something changes. In the last three years, AI has moved through some pretty significant shifts. We started with LLMs and Conversational AI, where the big breakthrough was simply being able to have a remarkably capable conversation with a machine. Then came RAG, where AI could work with our own information rather than relying only on what it had learnt. It is the technology behind RayAI, our own AI infrastructure at Toss the Coin. Then came AI agents, where instead of asking a question, we could give AI a task and let it work through the steps. And now we are beginning to see multi-agent orchestration, where several specialized agents can work together to accomplish something more complex.
Each step feels like a fairly small evolution when you look at it on its own. Put the four together, and the change is quite extraordinary.
I find that exciting and unsettling at the same time.
And with every step forward, the unsettling questions have changed too. I am less worried about the dramatic predictions of machines taking over the world than I am about something much more ordinary. Have I stopped thinking my way out of a problem and started relying too much on AI? Am I becoming too dependent on AI?
And then I happened to look at a painting I did four years ago, at a time when AI wasn’t part of my daily life. It was still futuristic technology, something a relatively small group of geeks seemed to be obsessing about.
The painting has three doors opening onto the sea. The sea is the same, but the view through all three doors is different.
Perhaps that is the answer to my unsettling apprehensions.
It is not about what AI is or what it is becoming. Just which door I happened to be standing at when I looked through it.
The sea hasn’t changed.
The view has.
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