Biggest ever, apparently

Karen has been given a client presentation. This is the news I received on Thursday, via an email chain so long it had collapsed into a single line in my inbox marked "Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: AI Showcase — stakeholder deck."

I am not on that chain. Nobody told me about the presentation. I found out because Karen stopped by my desk to ask if ARIA had "evolved at all since the beginning."

I said it had, yes.

She said great, and went back to her desk.

I should explain that Karen last received a formal briefing on the product in January. This was week one. At that point the product was a document summarisation tool we'd demoed to three people in a room. She described it in the resulting materials as a "proprietary large language neural AI blockchain solution," and while I did ask where the blockchain came from, I did not receive a satisfying answer and have since stopped asking.

Eight months have passed. The product is considerably more than a summarisation tool. Priya has built the multimodal endpoint. There are users. There are bugs that are also features. There is an AI policy from Dave, which nobody has fully read but everyone is technically governed by. There is a metric in the team channel that Marcus invented and which may or may not be tracking anything real. There are three closed backlog tickets and a number of open ones that have achieved the kind of permanence usually associated with infrastructure.

None of this is in Karen's deck.

I know this because, at some point Thursday afternoon, Karen sent a draft to what I can only assume she thought was a different distribution list, and I received a slide pack called AI Showcase FINAL v2 STAKEHOLDER USE.pptx.

Slide three describes ARIA as an "enterprise-grade autonomous reasoning intelligence agent." This is a reasonable description of something. It is not a description of ARIA. Slide five says we use "cutting-edge multimodal neural processing" and has a photograph of a server room that I am fairly confident was licensed from Shutterstock. Slide seven says "blockchain-enabled audit trail" and I genuinely do not know how the blockchain keeps getting back in. It is like a cat. You put it outside and it reappears on the windowsill.

Slide nine is a roadmap. The roadmap lists things we have already built as upcoming features. The image thing — which Priya built overnight in May, closing three tickets — is listed as "Q4: Visual Intelligence Layer (in development)." It has a little orange dot next to it. The orange dot means "in progress." The thing is done. The orange dot is lying.

This week, SpaceX became the biggest IPO in history. Elon Musk is on the verge of becoming the world's first trillionaire. Eleven digits of capital in motion, changing hands, setting records. The scale of it is genuinely difficult to hold in your head.

Karen's deck describes ARIA as being "in the same category" as things "reshaping global enterprise infrastructure." Slide two. Before she's even told anyone what it does.

I showed Priya the deck. She looked at it for a long time.

"Visual Intelligence Layer," she said.

"In development," I said.

She turned back to her screen. "I'm going to push a patch this afternoon. Don't tell anyone."

I wasn't planning to.

The presentation is on Tuesday. I have been told, via a message from Marcus that arrived while I was writing this, that he will be attending to "provide context on the roadmap." He has sent a thumbs up emoji. The thumbs up is not reassuring.

I have added a comment to the multimodal endpoint file. It says // this is built and working. has been for three weeks. see ticket #203. This is not visible to Karen. It is not visible to the client. It is visible to whoever eventually reads the code, which may be me, may be Priya, and is statistically unlikely to be anyone making slides about global enterprise infrastructure.

Greg's protein shake is strawberry again. Some things hold.