Writing Boots

They had an eclipse in Europe this week. Legendary Chicago weatherman and Chicago treasure Tom Skilling—he’s got a very funny cameo in The Bear—had a powerful emotional reaction to a similar event a few years ago, in the Midwest.

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I always think I’m too hard on Axios, and the mindless shit they publish.

Whether it was a piece I wrote a few years ago headlined, “Reading the Axios Communicators Newsletter = Eating Toilet Paper,” or another piece I wrote about Axios CEO Jim VandeHei, and how he brags (in an Axios piece on his morning routine) about, as I characterized it, “Farting Around Well Before Dawn!”

Either Axios needs to mature, or I do.

Alas, I read an Axios interview on “AI in the C-suite,” with Robin Vince, CEO of BNY bank. The Axios reporter asked Vince, “On a scale of 0 to 10, 0 being no AI usage and 10 being totally AI-pilled, where would you rank yourself?”

Vince answered: “I’m probably a nine out of 10. I won’t give myself a full score though, because one of the lessons for me in AI is that it’s moving so quickly that actually being able to use it to its fullest extent feels like one of those quests you’re never going to quite reach.” He continued, “This feels to me like one of those lessons that is not unique to AI. We all have to be lifelong learners,” and added that it’s all about “being OK with being a bit uncomfortable.”

Bank CEOs have a funny definition of “uncomfortable,” I find. But OK, Robin Vince. Tell us what it’s like on the hairy edge of lifelong learning about AI: He tells Axios that in a big bank, “there’s no person who can see the picture as completely, so now to have AI be able to see a picture you otherwise couldn’t have seen and make recommendations in terms of what you’d actually do? That’s a very significant thing.” He praised AI’s “ability to see through all of these threads and hold them concurrently.”

So as a bank CEO, he’s not omniscient, Vince humbly acknowledges. But as a bank CEO who uses AI, he pretty much is. Got it.

The reporter, who I’m not naming here because she works for Jim VandeHei, a degenerate AI huffer who forces his journalists to hype this stuff relentlessly, asks Vince for an example of how he uses BNY’s in-house AI platform, called Eliza. First, he says that Eliza is connected to the bank’s “360-degree feedback process,” and that Eliza can coach employees who aren’t responding emails quickly enough, into … responding to emails quicker, I guess.

What about Vince himself? This is the one and only example he offers of how he uses AI to see everything everywhere all at once:

“This is where I humble myself because I’m sure that my usage of it is like 5% of what it could be if I was operating perfectly. … [Eliza] understands my calendar. It understands my emails. It understands my documents, and so it coaches me at the beginning of the day, with how I should approach my day proactively. So this morning I open up the Eliza Daily Planner, and it’s starting to give me advice about you should use this bit in your calendar to prep for this other meeting, or there’s this email that’s been lost in your email box, which Eliza thinks is important that you haven’t done anything with.”

Wait, in a few Axios paragraphs, Vince has gone from 9 out of 10 in “AI-pilled” to using AI for only 5% of what it might be used for. Wait again: My Apple Mail is doing all those things he’s bragging about, automatically and often against my will. I won’t say CEO AI Genius Robin Vince is an emperor wearing no clothes, but he’s definitely wearing assless chaps. And Axios is telling us how good they look on him.

And here’s more bad news from Axios: “This is our first installment in a series on how executives use AI tools.”