Several years ago when the cloud became a thing, people were freaking out about it. When smartphones came out, people were freaking out about that. Freaking out about new technology is a very human thing to do. I am sure there were ancient people who freaked out about the discovery of fire and the invention of the wheel. The wheel will make us all lazy. When we were kids, we carried everything. Uphill. In both directions.
AI is the latest thing to divide people with strong opinions, and it will follow the same arc. Artificial intelligence is a tool, albeit an unusually powerful one. What it cannot do is think for you. It hands you so much information so quickly that it becomes easy to treat it as a substitute for your own judgment, or as a stand-in for the people in your life who actually know you — your doctor, your accountant, your financial advisor. The tool works. Most of us are still learning how to use it.
What This Looks Like in My Business
I use AI in my business every day. I write a lot of content, and over the last couple of years I've built a process that combines my own writing with a handful of tools, some AI and some not.
Blog writing is technical work. Keywords, headers, how the content is laid out, what to add, what to cut, and making sure every fact in it is accurate. When I started this business ten years ago I could only take on so many blogs a month, because each one took forever. The writing was never the slow part. The editing, the proofing, the back and forth with clients getting the details straight — that is where the time went. The tools I use now handle enough of that work that I have been able to double my bandwidth.
The Judgment Is Still Mine
Cutting the fat is something AI is genuinely good at, and it will happily keep cutting after the fat is gone. I had a post come back from an editing pass with bullet points in nearly every section. Nothing in it was wrong, exactly. The tool had decided what the piece needed was more lists, and the flow of the whole thing was gone. Any time a tool rearranges or drops something I put in on purpose, I stop and work back through it, because that is a tool making decisions without me.
People send me blogs that were clearly written by AI in one pass, and you can tell immediately. That is what everybody means when they talk about AI slop — the entire job handed over by someone who did not know what the job was. My process works because I know which tool to reach for, what I need it to do, and when to push back on what it hands me.
Built Out of Its Worst Days
Right now, AI is the wild west. Companies are pushing the technology to its limits, and like anything else, some of what they are trying works great and some of it does not. The failures are the part that travels. A system that quietly does its job every day is not a story. A system that goes sideways is. So the picture most people have of AI gets assembled out of its worst days, which is a strange way to judge anything.
Will AI Replace Workers?
It is the question I get asked most, and unfortunately we are already seeing it. Companies are laying people off and saying AI has streamlined their systems to the point where they don't need as many. That is happening. We've all seen the stories and the interviews with CEOs.
The part I push back on is the explanation. I spent enough years inside corporations to know that the reason given for a layoff and the reason for a layoff are two different things. You find out on a Tuesday that a department of 350 is now a department of 300, and the announcement always has a clean story attached to it. Restructuring. Synergies. Refocusing on the core business.
AI is just the current story, and it is a better one than the old ones because it sounds like progress instead of a bad quarter.
That is what makes this moment hard to read. Some of those jobs really are being done by software now. Some of them were going away regardless and AI showed up at a convenient time. From the outside you usually cannot tell which is which, and neither can the person who got the call.
It settles down from here. It always does. Companies will work out what the tool is actually good at, the headlines will move on to whatever is next, and in a few years AI will be one more thing running quietly in the background, like the cloud and the smartphone in your pocket. The people who do well in the meantime are the ones who learn to use it and keep thinking for themselves.