"AI Architect" in your LinkedIn title and resume is the new "Growth Hacker" from 2013. It's a costume, not a credential.
You know what we called people who designed systems that happened to include machine learning five years ago? Engineers. Architects. Sometimes just "the person who's been here longest and knows where the bodies are buried."
Now everyone's an AI Consultant. An AI Strategist. I saw "AI Wizard" last week. Wizard. We're doing wizard now.
If you've spent twenty years building distributed systems, shipping products, debugging production at 3am, you don't need to rebrand yourself as AI-Adjacent. You're not a supplement to the technology. You're the reason it might actually work.
The people adding "AI" to their title are the same people who added "blockchain" in 2017 and "metaverse" in 2021. Bunch of frauds wishing their NFT worked out and recently burned out from the MLM they joined but are still trying to sell you on.
Meanwhile the actual work, the hard work, still looks the same. Understanding constraints. Managing tradeoffs. Telling someone their pet feature is a terrible idea and here's why, with receipts.
That doesn't fit on a badge at a conference. But it ships.
Stop calling yourself an AI anything. Build things. The title finds you.
❤️
Jake