Leadership

I thought AI was going to make me more productive. Maybe even give me some of my time back. That was the plan 😅 It didn’t quite work out that way.

Instead, it made it a lot harder to ignore where things were actually broken.

If I’m being honest, the signs were already there. Over the past year of building with AI, I kept seeing the same pattern: the tools weren’t the bottleneck. The system was.

I wrote about some of that in A Year of Building, Learning, and Laughing My Way Through AI at Ford—but I don’t think I fully appreciated what it meant yet.

The model I started with

I was thinking about AI the same way most leaders are right now: As a tool. Something teams could use to move faster. Write code quicker. Summarize more. Do more in less time. And to be fair—it can do that.

But that framing assumes something important: That your system already works.

That your workflows are clean.
That your systems of record are reliable.
That your teams are operating with enough discipline for speed to matter.

If that’s true, AI helps.

If it’s not…

AI doesn’t fix it.
It exposes it.

From Raw Notes to Signals — and How AI Became the Multiplier

For years, my file system looked “organized.” Folders. Subfolders. Strategic docs. I even kept an Archive. And yet I still felt friction. Not clutter, per se. But instead, what you could call “cognitive drag.”

I would remember that a decision happened — but not why. I knew we discussed a risk — but couldn’t recall the trade-offs. Ultimately, I had notes — but not leverage.

The problem wasn’t file chaos. It was signal decay. I made it hard for myself to find what actually mattered.

AI-Augmented Leadership Is Not About Using AI

The model I started with

How I Finally Tamed My Chaotic Files

From Raw Notes to Signals — and How AI Became the Multiplier

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