We’ve all been there: listening to a talk, podcast or reading about groundbreaking innovations, especially on LinkedIn. It all sounds fantastic, super new, cutting edge technology – almost too good to be true. And often … it is.

Overselling seems to be more common lately – or maybe I’m just noticing it more? Especially with the AI “trend” lately, everyone is “AI first” and doing extremely successful programmes – it seems. But when you get to know someone in the tech field directly, it turns out that we’ve just seen a proof-of-concept project, a project that was stopped after a while for various reasons (didn’t bring the expected results, was over budget, or was never intended to go live at all), or that it is just WAY more complex than illustrated and only the very tiny cool part was told.

It also seems like a pattern to me: The higher someone is in a company, the less reliable their statements are. C-level executives sell visions, middle management sell their successes / themselfes, while engineers are more likely to tell the real story (tech debt, failed experiments, complex architecture and hard compromises).

I think I’ve developed a healthy(?) scepticism. The first questions I ask myself are Who is telling the story (position)? Why are they telling the story (promoting the technology, promoting themselves, promoting a solution)? What is not being said?

The truth seems to be often in the gaps … unfortunately.