Everyone at the Show Told Me They Were "Doing AI." Nobody Could Tell Me Why.

Last week I walked Dreamforce in San Francisco and asked every company I stopped at the same question:

What problem are you solving with AI?

About a dozen conversations. Same answer almost every time: "We're doing AI."

Not "we're solving X." Not "we want to move this metric." Not even "we think our customers want this." Just: doing AI.

Here's what made it stranger. These weren't twelve copies of the same company. Big companies and small ones. Companies older than I am, and companies less than ten years old. Different markets, different customers, different stages of maturity. Every one of them gave the same answer with the same lack of direction behind it.

When I pressed, the answers got vaguer, not clearer. Roadmap commitments without a user on the other end. Budgets with no outcome to point at. Teams staffed for a capability instead of a problem.

I've watched this exact movie before. At GM it was telematics features no dealer wanted to explain. At Creative it was software bundled because competitors bundled. The technology was real every time. The problem attached to it was not.

"Doing AI" is not a strategy. It's a status symbol with a roadmap attached. And it's expensive: the companies that can't name the problem will spend two years and a re-org learning what a discovery conversation would have told them in a week.

If you can't finish the sentence "we're using AI so that ___ gets better for ___," you don't have an AI initiative. You have an anxiety initiative.

What did the last person who told you they were "doing AI" say when you asked why?