The Bitter Lesson Of Workplace AI: Stop Engineering, Start Enabling
Citrix, September 17,2025
There's a famous concept in AI research called 'the bitter lesson.' Rich Sutton, one of the pioneers of reinforcement learning, observed that throughout AI's history, researchers kept learning the same painful truth: simple methods that leverage computation always beat sophisticated algorithms designed by clever humans.
Chess engines that simply searched more positions beat ones with hand-crafted strategies. Neural networks that just processed more data beat systems with carefully engineered features. Every time researchers thought they could outsmart brute force with intelligence, they were wrong. The bitter lesson? Stop trying to be clever. Scale and simplicity win.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially after writing about boring infrastructure and why enterprise AI projects fail. There's a workplace version of the bitter lesson playing out right now, and most IT departments are on the wrong side of it.