Don’t Hire the “AI Genius” Just Yet, Let me save you £5 million and six months of your life:
Do not go out and hire ten people who’ve just rebranded themselves from “technologist” to “AI genius” on LinkedIn.
You know the ones — freshly minted job titles, vague buzzwords, a portfolio full of half-baked pilots and conference selfies. They’ll waltz into your business, hoover up budget, and disappear into a black box of “AI experimentation.” Six months later, they’ll re-emerge with something that almost works. Almost.
The business will test it and say: “Not quite.”
They’ll go back, fiddle for another three months, and present version two.
Still not quite.
Then what happens? Everyone gets bored. The budget dries up. The project fizzles. And GenAI becomes “that thing we tried once.”
Why This Happens
Because building GenAI in a vacuum doesn’t work. Because you don’t need “AI geniuses.” You need people who can solve real problems, with the business — not in spite of it.
And because great GenAI doesn’t start with tech. It starts with pain. What’s the broken process?
What’s the buried archive of knowledge? What’s the decision that’s slow, repetitive, or painful today?
If you can’t answer that, you’ve no business hiring anyone — let alone a squad of overpaid dabblers with a Kaggle trophy.
What to Do Instead: Start small. Start where the business already has momentum.
Start where GenAI can support the humans, not try to replace them.
And for the love of all things budget-related — don’t build a lab. Build something useful.
In short: Don’t get dazzled by job titles, Get obsessed with outcomes.
And remember: most “AI geniuses” are just regular technologists in a different font.