I think one of the strangest scenes in modern corporate life is the sight of very intelligent adults speaking about artificial intelligence in the tone earlier centuries reserved for saints, oracles, and unusually gifted horses. Why so much reverence? I was at a panel discussion last week and it is frightening how executives use buzzwords around AI. I sense this is for investors’ ears and nowhere near reality.

The machine, they tell us, will draft the memo, summarize the meeting, prepare the analysis, write the code, recommend the strategy. It is always about to save us from some exhausting portion of ourselves. One listens for long enough and begins to suspect that what many organizations really want is not intelligence, but relief. I think we need to push back against this.

AI elevates capability. It does not eliminate it

I do not say this lightly. Anyone who has spent years inside institutions knows how much human labor is spent not on thought but on the staging of thought. We produce documents to prove that we have considered a problem, presentations to prove that we have discussed it, process notes to prove that we have governed it, and emails to prove that no one can later say they were not copied at 18:43 on a Thursday evening. Into this long comedy of administrative self-protection arrives a machine that can generate all the signs of diligence in seconds. It is no wonder executives feel a little weak at the knees.