Most leaders are mispricing AI
Most leaders are mispricing AI.
They’re arguing about “intelligence” while the defensible value is a service bundle humans can’t deliver at scale: patience, constant availability, non-judgment, and compression.
That bundle changes what work is even possible.
In a real company, the hidden bottleneck is not “knowing.” It’s asking.
People avoid exposing confusion in front of a peer group. They defer the “dumb question.” They stop after the second follow-up because they can feel the room tighten. Then a bad assumption survives into a steering committee deck and becomes expensive.
AI removes the social tax on clarification.
That does not just improve answers. It increases the volume of questions. And the volume of questions is what determines how quickly ambiguity collapses.
The second-order effect is uncomfortable: if your organization relies on friction, embarrassment, or scarcity of attention to keep requests down, AI will surface the demand you’ve been suppressing.
You’ll see it in three places:
Requirements that suddenly triple in detail.
Edge cases product teams “never heard about.”
Managers who realize half their check-ins were translation, not leadership.
The strategic question is not “Is the model smart enough?”
It’s “What happens when everyone can ask 50 follow-ups a day without costing political capital?”