AI Hype vs Reality
I’ve been thinking a lot about the value AI is actually delivering to organizations right now. The question I’m asking is: Is AI delivering real value? Is it living up to the hype and the lofty expectations of the evangelists?
For the most part, I think AI is falling short. At this stage, it’s costing companies significantly more in time and focus than it is delivering in utility.
The Rise of “Performative Productivity”
We are entering an era of “performative productivity,” where the goal isn’t to be useful, but to appear busy. Because AI makes it nearly free to generate content, we are being flooded with it. But we’ve forgotten that while the cost of generation has dropped to zero, the cost of attention has never been higher.
Take this example from just this week: A high-ranking leader copy-pasted AI-generated notes from a four-hour strategic partner session and blasted them to the entire team.
The result? A 2,000-word email with zero value-add.
The Infinite Loop of Noise
This wasn’t just a neutral event; it was a massive waste of time. Why would anyone think a raw transcript dump is an actionable, informative email?
The Sender saved 20 minutes of thinking and synthesizing.
The Team (perhaps 20+ people) now has to spend 15 minutes each trying to find the “signal” in the noise.
The only way to actually make sense of that email is to—ironically—use AI to distill the takeaways that the sender should have distilled in the first place. We are officially using AI to summarize the AI summaries that were too long to read. This is a “negative ROI” loop.
Synthesis is the Real Work
The problem is that AI evangelists often mistake output for outcome.
Output: A 2,000-word summary of a meeting.
Outcome: A team that understands the next three critical steps they need to take.
AI is a “math model,” not a “meaning model.” It doesn’t know what was a breakthrough moment in a meeting versus what was a circular argument about the lunch menu. When we outsource the cognitive labor of distilling and prioritizing, we aren’t being “efficient”—we’re just being lazy. We are passing the burden of thinking onto the recipient.
Conclusion
Until we stop using AI as a “productivity skin” to hide a lack of critical thinking, it will continue to cost organizations more than it yields. Real value isn’t found in how many words the AI can generate for us; it’s found in how much time the AI can save us from having to read them.
Right now, we’re failing that test.
-Jared