I wish I were more surprised. The truth is I’ve been watching executives take their own intelligence out of the equation for some time.

They’ll say “is there any data we can use to make this decision?” And there’s nothing wrong with that yet - more information is good.

But they’ll press and press. “How are we going to measure outcomes? We need to agree on metrics first. What’s our OKR for this?”

They need everything to be spelled out in black and white. Number go up or number go down. That way they don’t actually have to think.

I’ve worked under some really good leaders who could see three steps ahead and knew where we were trying to go. They didn’t need to lay down data gathering instrumentation before taking any single step. They didn’t just throw A/B tests at a wall to see what stuck. But those days are behind me.

Outsourcing the whole shit show to AI only makes sense once you’ve already abdicated all complex thought and judgment.