Last week I reviewed a proposal I had drafted with AI. At first glance it looked good. When I looked more carefully, I saw cracks. An estimate that was not based on anything, a tone that was almost, but not quite, ours. Nothing dramatic, but enough to make me pause.
Sound familiar?
We are in a phase where AI is seeping into everything. You ask for something and it happens. At first that is fantastic. Everything goes faster, everything looks better. You think: why did I ever do this manually?
Until you start noticing that faster is not always better.
The psychologist Daniel Kahneman described two ways we think. System 1 is fast and intuitive: the brain on autopilot. System 2 is slow and deliberate: the brain that actually thinks.
AI is a System 1 machine. It produces output at lightning speed that looks good. And precisely because of that, you stay on autopilot yourself. Tick the box, on to the next.
But the value is not in what AI produces. The value is in what you do with it.
The best results we see, in our own work and at our customers, happen when people use AI not to think less, but to think better.
That proposal from last week? It ended up considerably stronger. Not because of the AI, but because I took the time to go through it myself.
The question is not whether you use AI. The question is whether you still think.