Background
ChatGPT took the world by storm and ever since then every product seems to have AI. There are even tools that promise to provide more AI for AI power users. One could even say, some AI for you AI. How do you know when someone is ripping you off or just selling you snake oil? Here is my short opinion on that.
IDEs Are Awesome!
I think developer tools for building out application are awesome! I am currently writing this on Cursor and I love the product. The built in text generation, code suggestions, and just general speeding up of coding is awesome. This also includes Github Copilot, Amazon Q for coding, and a few other tools like that! I think all of these are great tools that help developers in their IDEs.
English to Code
There are a few tools out there that take your English demands and turn them to code. V0 and Bolt.new are both tools where you can describe a frontend and it will generate it for you. Both of these tools start off as free, but I think are totally worth the money!
Process Improvement Apps
This can be a little tricky, just because there are more and more vendors coming out in this area. My favorites so far are M365 Copilot and Copilot Studio. They are fairly cheap licenses and really help empower your productivity!
Misc Tools
Other tools and offerings I keep up on are any of the big cloud providers. I really understand what the major cloud providers can give me out of the box and that saves your bacon A TON when it comes to snake oil salesman. If you’re reading this you probably know my favorite cloud is Azure, but AWS and GCP have a lot of similar offerings. Azure has translations, video dubbing, ai services, vector dbs, etc the list goes on and on.
How to Avoid Snake Oil
I think the biggest recommendation I have in this category is to try to understand what your cloud provider offers in terms of AI. Quite a few “new” companies out there have some special sauce on how to chat with your data, or to get insights, safety protection etc. Don’t worry for a low low price of a massive contract YOU TOO can have this! A lot of these products I’ve seen are either just rebranding cloud offerings and marking them up, or just a worse implementation of something that already exists. How do you justify to someone that content safety is so important and we should bring in a third party when the third party doesn’t measure themselves against Azure’s built in content safety. Worse yet is when you’re talking to a startup and they don’t know a cloud offers their same product, packaged nicely for you to use! That is a huge red flag for me.
Conclusion
Since agents are getting more easily built and people can easily use off the shelf AI I think we are going to see rapid iteration on AI companies, but like in every gold rush there is always going to be snake oil vendors. I will make a broad offer. If anyone is debating on if a product is snake oil or worth digging deeper on, drop me a message on Linkedin. I’m happy to sit in on a sales call with you and to tell you if Azure has a cheaper off the shelf offering!