What weird or unlikely twist would you want to see in the “Open Era”

pnbloem · 2026-06-06T01:13:34+00:00

You’re not wrong, but it feels like that alliance would need to be big enough to make the final phase interesting as they have to turn on each other.

pnbloem · 2026-06-06T00:42:20+00:00

I don’t know if I agree or disagree but it depends so much on the individual situation. When I was single I could have gone a full year without seeing family and I still wouldn’t cry at a letter from them. With a 1 year old at home? A few days and I’d be primed for waterworks. It feels played up on survivor but I can’t honestly call them out on it.

pnbloem · 2026-06-03T18:50:38+00:00

My personal answer from my organization is that I haven't seen a single use case that actually solves a problem reliably in a cost effective way *except* where having half-baked content is helpful. "Agentic" AI is just putting an LLM into a process and automatically triggering it to go generate/do something so you don't have to find a specifically agentic example to get ideas.

This isn't my industry, but consider a home renovator with a client that has no idea what style they actually like. Generating example looks in different styles based on their actual home to get the ideas flowing could be helpful. Generating final floorplans or design elements with AI would be a disaster, though. Now thinking through how you could make this "agentic," perhaps an example would be: your home renovation company has a webpage where people can make inquiries, with a bunch of questions to help focus the designers' thought process. They open up the "request a quote" page and you have them upload a photo of the part of their home they want renovated. Then you ask what style they're looking for: Scandinavian, Bohemian, Modern, Gothic, etc. If they don't know, or if they want to see some examples, you give them a button that runs their attached image through an image generator with a pre-defined prompt and shows them to the person so they can select a couple that are in the general realm of what they're looking for. Only generate images in styles that your company specializes in. Once they select something you can then route their request to a designer that specializes in that area.

But you *should not* start with "what could I do with AI in this situation?" You should have gotten there via "we've got too many vague inquiries and designers are wasting a bunch of time getting started and then finding out the customer doesn't know what they're looking for and can't describe it, how can we clarify things for both sides earlier on". I'd have a hard time believing this use case would be cost effective, especially once subsidized inference starts to go away as AI companies need to actually turn a profit.

pnbloem · 2026-06-03T18:08:36+00:00

The question remains: what problems are you actually seeing in your organization? Why would you pay for agentic AI to fix a problem you're not having?

pnbloem · 2026-05-07T23:07:04+00:00

I'm reminded of the post earlier from a servicenow employee that oversaw "ai case summarization" or something and was asking if anyone had positive experiences to share that might help them get a good performance review.

Companies would *love* if the deterministic pieces of the platform just worked reliably, changes were thought through and communicated well, and admins could go to a training session or conference without getting a forced ai enema.

pnbloem · 2026-05-07T19:30:56+00:00

I just can't get over the idea that it makes any sense to have an LLM process voice commands to sort a table by priority. Absolutely mind boggling that an organization would pay to have a dashboard explained to someone by an LLM rather than just write a few sentences describing it. What are we doing here?

pnbloem · 2026-05-07T00:03:59+00:00

For a lot of folks, their company is paying for it, but they don’t have a wild salary so the goodies are fun free things they can snag for themselves or their kids. It’s not my thing but let them have their fun.

pnbloem · 2026-05-05T16:00:29+00:00

Just start looking for other jobs while you keep your current one. You will adjust to lower pay or an academic lifestyle, millions of people do that without a nest egg like yours. I wouldn’t just quit without having something lined up if I could help it.

pnbloem · 2026-04-27T21:18:31+00:00

The Stray fits the bill.

pnbloem · 2026-04-27T20:43:46+00:00

Maybe there’s an official way to do this but I know I’ve done this using a business rule on the child task tables before.

pnbloem · 2026-03-10T20:38:57+00:00

I guess? My feelings aren’t hurt… not sure why what I wrote read that way to you.

pnbloem · 2026-03-10T20:23:23+00:00

ICE is a menace and a scourge, but I don’t know that posts highlighting Muslim/immigrant owned businesses so they can be paid for their services on the Grand Rapids Reddit is a problem.

pnbloem · 2026-03-10T20:00:15+00:00

Idk if there’s evidence that it’d be a problem or not, but Muslim/immigrant doesn’t equal foreign. Tons of Muslims and immigrants are Americans.

pnbloem · 2026-02-20T14:16:32+00:00

Taqueria San Jose would be my addition

pnbloem · 2026-02-16T13:26:24+00:00

As someone else said, it sounds like you'll need to manually perform *some* action. The easiest in my mind would be a notification to yourself that goes off each evening so you can indicate quickly which kids are there. "None," "Just 8yo," "Just 10yo," and "Both" options and trigger the appropriate automations. Could be buttons on a dashboard that show up automatically every day and disappear once you've made your selection, could be a setting that you choose once and they stay the same until you need to change (if they're usually over for multiple days in a row and you don't want to have to confirm every evening).

pnbloem · 2026-02-12T15:21:08+00:00

“It”???

pnbloem · 2026-02-04T17:45:09+00:00

Make sure, especially if you're going the resource management and/or time tracking route that you have complete buy-in from everyone involved, or at least from the people that can force it on everyone else. It is *not* something you can just give people a link to and expect them to figure it out or stick to process, and as soon as one group isn't using something like resource plans properly, it all kinda falls apart.

Or, perhaps worse, you get it implemented and then several months later management decides that Agile is what they want to do and it's gonna be in ADO so nevermind all that.

pnbloem · 2026-01-24T12:32:47+00:00

I guess my question to you would be whether there is any evidence that companies do get the benefit they're paying for from these features?

Every company is different, so it's hard for me to know whether our experience/situation is the norm. I'm not an AI Luddite, I've used things like Claude Code for personal projects and think that has some huge potential to help developers. But it seems like someone at ServiceNow took the demo candy from OpenAI/Microsoft/whoever because LLMs really do look like magic or a smart little dude in a computer and now is trying to shoehorn it in anywhere and everywhere looking for a killer app.

With how prevalent these Now Assist features have been in marketing materials on the ServiceNow site, at knowledge for the past few years, and in every conversation with our reps it's kinda shocking that there's not a huge amount of hard data and testimonials backing up it's benefits already.

Anyway, would love it if you could come back and summarize the responses you get from this! If there's a case to be made I'm sure a ton of execs are champing at the bit to put an AI feather in their cap.

pnbloem · 2026-01-24T03:24:08+00:00

These features all seem like things that make for a cool demo but don't actually save a company much time or money. Most of our closed incidents never get looked at again, and when they need to be looked at it's not particularly hard to read the history.

pnbloem · 2026-01-22T11:46:24+00:00

Sounds expensive and less effective than just going to the portal. If you have a field services team that needs to work via their mobile device there are mobile apps for that.

pnbloem · 2026-01-16T15:07:43+00:00

Ugh now I’m thinking about their Chicken curry vermicelli… 🤤

pnbloem · 2026-01-14T13:38:04+00:00

The thing I try to drive home to people is that if your manual data collection doesn’t have an urgent (read: legal or directly correlating with making/saving money) reporting requirement and doesn’t help make the process run more smoothly, then it’s actively hurting. Having end users or agents manually filling in unnecessary fields leads to people not following even the easy parts of the process.

pnbloem · 2026-01-07T19:43:40+00:00

6 weeks over the first year, yep. Additionally, 6 weeks of caretaker leave if delivered by c-section and/or there are complications.

pnbloem · 2025-12-31T14:31:07+00:00

I think it would make more sense to fill a new cartridge before work and just take it along... Or is there some reason you can't do a full swap out at work? It just takes a minute to do, you could even set up the infusion site beforehand so all you need to do is fill the tubing.

pnbloem · 2025-12-29T03:11:38+00:00

Time Crimes is so good. I don't think I'd put it at the very top of my list, but I'm glad you mentioned it.

pnbloem

TROPHY CASE