The Age of Professionally Produced Mediocrity
I think we may be entering the greatest era of professionally produced mediocrity in human history, and I do not mean just LinkedIn posts that sound like they were written by an extremely articulate committee of beige cardigans. I mean strategy decks, market analyses, business cases, emails, presentations, research, positioning statements, operating models, job descriptions, customer personas, and probably birthday cards from your grandmother eventually.
AI has made it ridiculously easy to be competent. That is amazing, obviously! I use ChatGPT and Claude constantly, and I am not talking about occasionally asking one of them to rewrite an email because I somehow used the word “strategy” nine times in three paragraphs. As a strategist, I have used LLMs hundreds, probably thousands, of times to challenge assumptions, organize research, compare frameworks, pressure-test ideas, simulate arguments, find gaps, generate alternatives, and occasionally tell me that the framework I spent four hours creating is basically useless.
Competence Is No Longer the Advantage
That is the part I think we are underestimating. If everyone has access to the same astonishingly capable thinking machine, the machine itself cannot be the competitive advantage, and asking it better questions probably only gets you so far. If I ask AI to develop a strategy and my competitor asks the same AI to develop theirs, there is a decent chance we both end up with slightly different versions of “focus on customer outcomes, build differentiated capabilities, strengthen partnerships, and execute with discipline.” Congratulations, we have both discovered business. Somewhere, a PowerPoint template just shed a single tear.
Competitive advantage has always come from seeing something other people do not see, believing something other people do not believe, having access to something other people cannot easily copy, or making a choice other people are unwilling to make. AI can absolutely help you get there, but it can also pull you aggressively toward the statistical center of everything that has already been said, and the center is incredibly seductive because it sounds smart, reasonable, polished, and safe.
I Want AI to Make Me Weirder
And by “weird,” I do not mean random for the sake of random, showing up to a strategy meeting dressed as a wizard (and if you know me…I love to dress up in costumes!), or replacing every chart with a meme. Although, depending on the meeting, I am not completely ruling those out. I mean the stuff that is unusually specific, a little unexpected, specifically personal, slightly off-pattern, or rooted in a connection that would never show up in the average answer. I chose the word “weird” because words like “original,” “authentic,” and “differentiated” have been overused so many times they barely have meaning left. Weird still has some texture to it. It suggests there is something in the work that came from an actual person with an actual point of view, rather than from the safest possible average of everything that came before.
This is why I have started thinking differently about what “good” AI use actually looks like. I do not want AI to remove my weirdness; I want it to give my weirdness industrial machinery, because those are very different outcomes. One turns me into a slightly better-looking (figuratively) version of everyone else. The other lets me explore fifty ridiculous ideas, investigate six, abandon four, become humorously obsessed with one, discover something completely unrelated halfway through, and eventually emerge with an argument I probably never would have reached on my own. That is how I like to use AI!
That process is messy because actual thinking is messy. My best ideas rarely arrive as neatly labeled bullet points; they show up while I am arguing with an AI model, reading an unrelated research paper, staring at a diagram that annoys me, remembering something a customer said three years ago, or wondering why airport carpeting always seems designed by someone experiencing a mild fever dream. I have no strategic insight about airport carpeting, unfortunately, although I remain suspicious.
The Human Part Is the Point
So yes, use AI everywhere. Abuse the horsepower, generate 100 options, ask it to criticize you, challenge you, organize you, interrogate you, disagree with you, and help you wander much farther than you could alone. Just do not outsource the part where you decide what you actually believe, because that is increasingly where the value lives. When everybody has access to extraordinary capability, originality, judgment, conviction, taste, experience, curiosity, and even a little irrational weirdness become more valuable, not less.
The objective was never to make our thinking look more professional. It was to make our thinking better, stranger, sharper, more specific, and harder for everyone else to copy.
Leave your fingerprints on it. Preferably a few smudges too.
