A few months back, I sat through a review where a team proudly showed me twenty AI-generated reports, decks, and campaign drafts. All produced in a week.
I asked one question - What did you learn while making these? The answer made me realise how easily output can get confused with thinking.
We are watching two things happen inside companies at the same time.
People are consuming more information than ever. Dashboards, reports, competitor summaries, AI-generated insights. And people are producing more output than ever. Decks, emails, content, code.
But production is not the same as creation.
→ Consuming a market report is not the same as understanding the market → Generating a strategy deck is not the same as having a strategy → Asking AI for ten options is not the same as making a decision → More output tells you very little about how much thinking actually happened
I have built and run a tech company for close to three decades.
The teams that actually move the business forward are rarely distinguished by how much they produce. They are the ones who sit with a problem long enough to have a point of view on it.
AI has made both consumption and production nearly effortless. That makes judgment more valuable, not less.
The ability to sit with a hard problem and think it through, not just get it summarised.
That is now the scarce skill inside a company. Not access to AI. The willingness to think before you generate.
How does your company tell the difference between output and insight?