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.
