A proof of concept is quick to build these days, and that is exactly where the problem starts. Classically around 70 percent of all PoCs got stuck in the PoC stage. With AI, going by the studies Steffen follows, the rate sits beyond 90 percent.
The CEOs of the big AI companies never tire of claiming that AI will wipe out up to 40 percent of all jobs. The headline works. School leavers ask Steffen whether a tech degree is still worth starting, and a German university has gone as far as advising against studying computer science.
When people talk about AI and jobs, they almost always mean developers. The larger part of the working world sits elsewhere, in offices, in HR, in marketing, in administration.
In episode 3 of Prompt & Proper, Steffen Ochsenreither from Swiss Post and I look exactly there. And we quickly land on a point that has nothing to do with technology. The episode is in German, and this post captures the core of the conversation.
On LinkedIn I keep reading that agentic coding makes teams 10x more productive. It is good marketing. It has little to do with what we measure in real projects.
In episode 2 of Prompt & Proper, Steffen Ochsenreither from Swiss Post and I take that number apart. And we talk about the other side of the same coin, the one that gets far less airtime: what tokens actually cost, and how solid the economics behind them really are. The episode is in German, and this post captures the core of the conversation.
Most AI projects do not fail on the technology. They fail earlier, on a thinking error: the hunt for one giant use case, the lighthouse project.
This is the launch of my new podcast Prompt & Proper, which I host together with Steffen Ochsenreither from Swiss Post. Every two weeks, in German, hands-on and without the marketing speak. Episode 1 takes apart what we call the “giant use-case fallacy”: why the management signal “we are doing AI now” so often ends in nothing, and what a good first use case actually needs. The episode is in German, and this post captures the core of the conversation.
