AI is now becoming a part of our lives and business operations, entering sectors of the economy and helping people in ways that seemed impossible only ten years ago. A well-known figure of this technological revolution is Christian Hammer, an entrepreneur and technologist with 30 years of experience in the sector.
As CEO of Vala AI, another similar-sounding company, Hammer is out to change the way technology aids businesses through the uncanny valley. More recently, in his conversation on the Tech Visionary Show, Hammer touched on everything from how AI is helping drive day-to-day business operations to a broader framework for what digital transformation really means.
Christian Hammer’s insights offer a roadmap for how AI is reshaping both business and creativity. The key takeaways from his conversation are:
Main Points
- AI as a Democratizing Force: Tools like ChatGPT are making complex technologies accessible to non-experts, democratizing creativity and problem-solving.
- Tech Debt is Holding Businesses Back: Many companies are burdened by outdated systems. AI can help bridge this gap, but it requires modernization and automation.
- The Future of Work: AI won’t replace human workers but will free them to focus on more meaningful tasks, driving innovation and growth.
- AI as an Enabler: AI isn’t just a tool; it’s an enabler that can help solve real-world problems, as demonstrated by systems like Lighthouse.
The Changing Technological Landscape
Hammer’s career has spanned a time of immense technological change, starting in the early 1990s. He reflects on how drastically things have shifted since the pre-internet days. Back then, access to information required manual labor—whether it was combing through library books or dealing with outdated encyclopedias.
Hammer's career has always been at the center of enormous technological advancements and changes over the last couple of decades. Here, we are talking about the 1990s. He recalls how extreme the changes were, viewed from a pre-internet context. So much useful knowledge was trapped only in books which people had to physically go looking for, be it searching for old encyclopedias or whole shelves of library files.
“If you think back to 1992 before the World Wide Web existed like it does today...you had to go to the library to get an encyclopedia to find out about basically anything,” Hammer recalls.
Now, all human knowledge is just clicks away, thanks to searchable browsers and touch-screen smart phones. One of the first seismic shifts that Hammer discusses is the creation of the web browser and how this changed access to information. Next was the age of connectivity, which began when we were able to communicate with each other in real-time, regardless of distance (hello internet).
“You can talk to somebody, interact with them like we’re doing right now, real-time, any point on the globe, free.”
According to Hammer, the last great evolutionary leap began when mobile phone took off. Not long ago, something as ubiquitous as smartphones—which put all of mankind's knowledge, communication, and history in the palm of your hand—did more to change how we live and work than any amount of automation.
Fast-forward to the age of AI, when machines like ChatGPT make it possible for anyone to talk with computers in their native human tongue.
AI and the Art of Creation
Although there are many aspects to discuss, the major part of the discussion revolves around the creative utilization of AI. According to Hammer, AI is far more than a means of making boring things happen – it is a way to make creativity available to everybody.
In a pre-AI world, only technological developers or people who understood difficult programming could code and construct software. Now, AI tools are filling this gap, allowing non-technical people to create, invent, and solve issues.
“It’s just now the computer speaks the language that you understand instead of you having to speak the language it understands,” Hammer explains.
To illustrate the evolution of this technology, Hammer refers to the MidJourney, an AI-based image generator he has been using. Through basic text prompts, users can generate elaborate images that are capable of competing with those of skilled artists. There has been panic about AI replacing human creativity; however, for Hammer, that is not the case.
“Just because I’ve spent most of my life developing skills to paint doesn’t mean I should have exclusive access to sharing my creativity with the world,” he asserts.
He compares this shift to the entry of photography into art. With the proliferation of cameras, there was also a widespread dread that photographers would soon replace painters and illustrators. Jobs were absolutely lost, but creativity wasn't going anywhere. It grew, however, expanding to new mediums of artistic exploration. On the other hand, AI is not subtracting from printers; instead, it adds more tools to free up human creativity.
Addressing "Tech Debt" in Business
One of the key issues that Hammer sees in the current business landscape is what he calls ‘tech debt.’ This means “the difference or gap between what most businesses expect their tech to do and what it is, in fact, able to do.”
Out of these, many companies stick to very old systems or less effective ways of doing things, making it more difficult to respond to changes in the market, new rules, or growing customer demands.
“What we're doing is effectively erasing that technical debt. We're catching the business up,” Hammer says about his work at Vala AI.
He says Vala AI is designed to automate repetitive tasks, allowing humans to concentrate more on higher-value actions. Hammer gives an example of his wife, who has advanced degrees and certifications and spends the majority of her day entering information into systems manually. This failure of technology needs to be undone.
He insists instead of freeing people to do what they were good at — what set them uniquely apart from machines — obsolete systems made them do monkeys' work. According to him AI should finally help free us from the “tyranny of the terminal,” or wasting time typing information into computers rather than thinking creatively with it.
This liberation is already happening, particularly in remote working. Hammer adds that his entire team is remote, and with AI, they can quickly task teams to perform together without being in one area. In the not-too-distant future, AI will be able to think for themselves and bring actions to life on their own.
“I can just tell it, ‘Hey Vala, set up a meeting for X, build this technology, tell my team to go do this,’ and it can plan it out and build and do it for me,” Hammer elaborates.
The Future of Work and AI Integration
Everyone is facing the burning question of whether AI is set to take over human jobs. Hammer tackles this directly when he claims that jobs will not be lost with the use of AI; rather, the tasks performed by humans will be adapted.
Repetitive and data-oriented tasks will be offered to automation while taking the load off people, enabling them to work on creativity, strategizing, and problem-solving.
“Free us up to do bigger, greater things,” Hammer encourages.
Still, Hammer stresses that there are a lot of barriers to even implementing AI within today's operational processes. Large sectors of the industry are running on technology that is old enough to have grandchildren, written in COBOL and FORTRAN, but there’s a knowledge gap as an older generation retires.
“This year is the peak for baby boomers' retirement...and when you look at a lot of the industries that that’s going to impact, it’s all these places where this knowledge is going to be lost,” he warns.
According to him, this loss of know-how and the asset of trained personnel is one of the greatest problems facing industries today. AI could help bridge this gap by relieving the burden of legacy systems, but doing that would seemingly take more time and effort than changing the whole system to new infrastructure.
Navigating AI's Ethical Concerns
Hammer has reservations about this issue but also has high hopes. Although there are some instances where AI can make “virtual skins” and even generate fake people, he thinks that the pendulum will eventually swing towards an appreciation for real-life human experiences.
“Everything’s a pendulum. We go hard one way, and then we come back,” he says.
There will be a lot of AI-generated content out there for years to come, but Hammer is confident that authenticity will always matter. Explosion of deep fakes and virtual identities will give way to increasingly authentic interactions.
AI in Action: The Lighthouse Example
Hammer joined Wayfair in a leadership role at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading logistics and supply chain technology. His most interesting anecdote is the one about how they built a system called Lighthouse that fixed a multibillion-dollar logistics/supply chain problem for the company.
Wayfair had emptied its shelves, and the orders kept coming, even as the pandemic messed up supply chains. Lighthouse was like a “data dictionary” that enabled the company to identify inventory stuck in various locations.
“All it did is it was like a data dictionary. It was literally like flip open a dictionary and look up a word and go, ‘Oh, that’s what that means.’”
This system allowed non-technical staff to find inventory and take action, meaning valuable time and resources were no longer being used. As featured in this example, AI and autonomous systems can be used to provide real solutions for everyday users by reducing the complexity of data.
The Road Ahead: The Vision for the Future
Software as we know it, he argues, will cease to exist as technologies advance to become more human-oriented.
Rather than using apps and programs to carry out specific functions, people would use AI agents to perform the tasks. This transformation is already underway with the use of voice assist devices and applications like ChatGPT, which makes Hammer think it will be getting faster.
“If I need a spreadsheet generated, I just say, ‘ChatGPT, I need a spreadsheet with this data in it,’ and it generates a spreadsheet for me,” Hammer explains.
Hammer is also preparing to release two books in the future. One (Fragile) focuses on how software has taken over the world and what has resulted from it, while the other (Sprinting to Stand Still) criticizes a constant need for quick changes in startups.
As AI changes, leaders like Hammer, who keep pushing the boundaries to protect and extend what it means to be human, are leading the charge.
