Codio CEO Doug Hughes tells IT Brew that AI should be treated as a tool

Will AI change humanity forever, or is it just another tool for IT pros to get stuff done?

Some version of that question has swirled around the tech industry for years, often driven by lofty promises. But as AI matures, IT pros and customers are looking beyond the hype at the technology’s limits and how it’s deployed.

The overall consensus: AI will continue to impact the industry—even if that impact isn’t as earth-shattering as you might believe.

We recently sat down with Doug Hughes, CEO of edtech platform Codio, to discuss how AI is perceived and its effectiveness as a tool.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

How do you feel about the debate over how to think about AI? Where does it fit in the tech stack?

I do believe it’s just a tool. I do not believe that we are close to artificial general intelligence. We’re miles and miles and miles away from that.

And at this point, it’s a power tool, right? It’s got a lot of capability. You don’t have to do it all by hand, but it is just a tool in a sea of other tools. The question becomes: How does this tool interoperate with the rest of my mission, critical business infrastructure? How does it interoperate with NetSuite, with HubSpot, with Salesforce, with whatever?

So, the question is less what is it, which as you say, it’s a tool, but how it works for IT teams?

That’s the key in terms of thinking about this, is how all of these different tools work together. At the same time, we see every one of these companies—like the ones that I just mentioned—coming out with their own flavor of these tools, which, by the way, is built on the Big Three that everybody else is using. Most of them are using the same basic technology.

Where does that leave us, then, if everyone is using it—how should we be looking at AI, the tool, in the workplace?

Right now, I think we’re dealing with tool overload.The message is starting to get overwhelming and fall a little bit flat. Everybody is promising the world, and nobody’s delivering on that. But it doesn’t mean that what they're providing is not amazing. It is. It really is.

But we’ve got a whole toolbox that we need to figure out how to work with, and this one thing is but one more tool in that toolbox. It’s a really cool one. It’ll send you to the hardware store on Father’s Day to get it. But it doesn’t replace the rest of the tools in the toolbox; it coexists.