AI is like a supercar: if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll hit a wall really fast. If you do know where you’re going, you’ll get to a great result really fast. Because it’s a tool that amplifies expertise and intelligence, not one that replaces it.

You’ve always had to validate what AI gives you.

Now AI keeps getting better and better. And that’s a dangerous point, because in the middle of a busy day you’ll be tempted to just trust the answer. That’s a big mistake.

You still have to think. You need to understand clearly what needs to be done and why exactly that. How we’ll profit from it. What mistakes we might make. What alternative strategies we have.

A lot of people don’t want to switch their brain on when working with AI. This spring at my Academy we had a PM on probation who just couldn’t stop sending me documents written by AI, and you could tell he hadn’t switched his brain on. I had to let him go, because it became clear the person can’t think. It took just three weeks. Thanks, AI, for making it obvious so fast.

Having access to AI and knowing how to prompt it is not an advantage. If everyone has the same supercar, what decides the race is expertise, knowing methodologies, being able to create value and deliver it to the customer.

If a person has never switched their brain on, AI just makes that visible faster. You'll drown in streams of AI slop without a single thought in it. If a person doesn't switch their brain on and their competitor does, they will lose to that competitor pretty quickly.

AI speeds up natural selection.

I think over the next year we’ll see teams rebuild around strong, smart people, and the ones who are too lazy to think and learn will get washed out.

AI will NOT build your strategy for you. AI will NOT do your market research for you. AI will NOT come up with value hypotheses for you. It will give you something that looks like the truth, and only if you really know your methodologies, understand how business works and how to solve business problems, will you be able to use the full potential of AI.

Today I was horrified to learn that some people use my product skills INSTEAD of market research and trust the AI’s output with those skills way too much. Market research with AI IS NOT RESEARCH. It’s a way to quickly sketch out how a market might work, but in no way a replacement for detailed market research.

Those who switch their brain on and really know their methodologies will win.