An employee uses ChatGPT to draft a proposal and sends it to a colleague. The colleague feeds it into their ChatGPT for an evaluation and sends back the feedback. The first employee asks ChatGPT to incorporate it and returns the revision.
A few rounds later, everyone agrees the work is finished. Success. Two people produced a proposal in a fraction of the usual time.
Notice that nobody asked the other person a question. They only exchanged answers.
Did they actually collaborate? Did they challenge each other’s thinking or understand the problem any better? Or did they trade AI-generated work until both systems agreed it was good enough?
I see this pattern a lot.
For decades, organizations have rewarded productivity. More output, less waste, less time. AI is very good at exactly that. Work that took hours now takes minutes.
The obvious move is to do the same work with fewer people. The savings are immediate and measurable, and companies do have to survive.
The alternative is to point the reclaimed time at the business itself. Imagine a team that uses its saved hours to interview ten customers a month and discovers a need no one had on the roadmap. Or a manager who replaces weekly status reports with a weekly session to brainstorm new solutions to problems we didn’t have time to explore in the past.
That all sounds great, but it’s harder than assigning tasks and measuring their completion.
It’s unstructured. It demands curiosity, judgment, and a willingness to take risks. It runs on conversations rather than statuses and finished assignments. It doesn’t produce neat deliverables or impressive slides.
We’ve become far more comfortable measuring completed work than evaluating the benefits of creative thinking.
And employees have adapted. Many have spent years accepting assignments, completing them, and moving on to the next task. They learned to wait for direction rather than offering opinions or challenging assumptions.
We’ve conditioned people to deliver answers. Now we need them to start asking questions.
That’s a challenge for managers and employees alike. Leaders have to create room for independent thinking, and employees have to rekindle their curiosity and the confidence to use it.
AI can serve either goal. It can write the proposal faster, or it can help us test assumptions and explore ideas. The first makes the business we have more efficient. The second builds a better one.
Ask your team what question they’d explore with five extra hours. Their initial reaction will tell you something about your culture. But their answers might tell you something important about your future.
Doing what we’ve always done more efficiently is now the price of admission. Discovering what we should be doing next is the real prize.
And getting there before our competitors do is how we win it.
Photo by Evgeni Tcherkasski on Unsplash
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