Apparently, I've been doing "forward deployed engineering" for about 26 years.
We just used to call it "go figure out what's wrong."
I tend to work best where technology, people, and mildly chaotic situations meet. I like understanding what someone is actually trying to accomplish, figuring out what's broken or missing, and staying with it until things make sense again.
A surprisingly large part of IT is also just helping people stop panicking.
Servers fail. Accounts get locked. Strange warnings appear. Someone clicks something they probably shouldn't have clicked.
That's usually when I'm at my best.
I've been called a hero a few times over the years, which sounds much more dramatic than it really is. Most of the time, I just showed up, stayed calm, asked the right questions, and knew what to try next.
That same mindset is what interests me about AI.
I'm hopeful about where all of this is going. I'm much more interested in what AI can help us create, understand, and accomplish than in worrying about P(Doom). There are real challenges to work through, certainly, but I think the opportunities are enormous.
If technology can help people think better, communicate more clearly, remove frustrating work, or do something they couldn't do before, I want to see where that leads.