AI Won’t Fix a Company That Can’t Ship with Nikhil Suresh
No-nonsense Agile Leadership
SubscribeSign in
AI Won’t Fix a Company That Can’t Ship with Nikhil Suresh
Murray Robinson<br>Jun 10, 2026
Share
Listen now or read below
NN - Intro VO: This is No-Nonsense Agile Leadership, where we explore better ways to develop digital products and services.<br>Joinworld-class experts for honest insights and practical advice to help you lead digital teams clearly and confidently. Subscribe now to learn the best ideas in the field.<br>Murray: Welcome to No Nonsense Agile Leadership. I’m Murray Robinson<br>Donna: I am Donna Spencer.<br>Nikhil: And I’m Nikhil Suresh<br>Murray: Hi Nickel. Thanks for coming on today.<br>Nikhil: Thanks for having me on.<br>Murray: So we wanna talk about your blog post. “I will fucking pile drive you if you mention AI again” , but before we start, can you tell us a bit about your background and experience?<br>Nikhil: Yeah, absolutely. So I think somewhat uniquely in the IT space, I studied psychology for four years at Monash University. Worked for a little bit in Southeast Asia, moved back to Melbourne, did my Master’s in Data Science. So that was finished up around 2019 when , aI roles are very popular. But we didn’t have GPT yet.<br>Even in 2019, a lot of the AI movement was fundamentally bullshit. Every job I got hired for, they said they wanted machine learning , what they actually had was spreadsheets and not much executive interest in moving past the spreadsheets.<br>Everyone I know in data science has now moved to data engineering because we saw the infrastructure was so weak, we needed to move on to more process oriented, less hyped up stuff. The data science market was starting to die off until chat GPT came out. It is now picked up and I don’t think the amount of bullshit has changed,<br>since then. I’ve started a data consultancy here in Melbourne and we have gone all in on not doing AI stuff, even though I would say 50% of our team have postgrad degrees in something, data science adjacent. I just think as a huge bubble, it’s not a smart place to invest our time if we’re looking at a longer time horizon because we can’t sell the business to someone for billions of dollars. The value is the people in it. So it doesn’t make sense. I’m not trying to fundraise or anything, so we don’t do AI stuff.<br>Murray: So what sort of projects or work have you done in the past?<br>Nikhil: So I’ve spoken about a couple in the blog. I was hired to do machine learning work for most of the corporate entities I was at before striking out on my own. Most of those projects never ended up having a huge machine learning component. And frequently after enough time it would turn out the problem was somewhere else, usually in the kind of DevOps stakeholder management, web development space. So I did a lot of that even though I didn’t have formal training in it.<br>I worked at a hospital for a while that was analyzing all the ambulance records in Australia. So for all of Australia, paramedics would fill out these reports and they would get sent to this place. I think they had 20 to 40 staff just literally reading paramedic records and labeling them, cocaine involved, heroin involved, alcohol involved. And they had this idea which was maybe we can build an AI platform to automate that and cut headcount. And that project ended up being 98% web development. Because even a case that, when you train a neural network or a random forest or whatever model, it just degenerates into a keyword search for either the word alcohol or not alcohol. That was the pattern that occurred over and over in corporate context, we would either need five lines of Python that someone could just look up on Google and get the thing going pretty easily, or you would need seven PhDs working on it for five years, in which case the business doesn’t take the project on.<br>So I ended up doing a lot of those two things, either just an intensely difficult problem that no one wanted to invest in, or the AI component was finished in the first week. And what was interesting was it was the only part we sold internally. We would do a bajillion lines of incredible code and we’d only fixate on the five AI ones because even then, 2019, it was the only way for executives to get promoted.<br>Murray: What led you to write this article?<br>Nikhil: I thought what I was saying was so obvious and tedious that everyone already feels this way. So I’m just gonna get it out ‘cause I’m annoyed. At the time I was working at a typical corporate environment and every day I’d be told something insane about LLMs. I quit that company and I got a call from a junior engineer yesterday complaining that every problem is still being addressed with, can we put an LLM in this? It’s very frustrating and I can’t believe it hasn’t stopped yet.<br>Murray: I was talking to a Digital Agency, CEO recently, who said he’d been into big corporates and they’ve got these big consultancy in and they’re telling me that AI’s gonna automate...