For decades the businesses of expertise, craftsmanship and luxury have run on a simple exchange: you paid for authority because authority was grounded in the living presence of a specific person. A marketer. A strategist. A lawyer. Someone who could sit across from you, who had walked through the problem themselves, whose judgement was embodied in a living mind that you could hire and pay. Presence became the marker of truth. Not the accuracy of what they said, but the fact t

The board asked for an AI strategy. What they got was a vendor presentation dressed in strategy's clothes. The vocabulary is being set by people with a commercial interest in your confusion. AI is not complicated. The industry around it is. What follows is the version of this conversation that the hyperbolic presentations skip. Here's the AI landscape for executives.

Developing concepts with Claude means understanding how Gen AI works and working with it's limitations. During an exploratory workflow today I ask it several questions as starting points to develop the nucleus of a concept. It came back with systems logic: structure, audience, constraints, examples. I told it the thinking would emerge from exploration instead. The AI pushed back. We went sideways anyway.

Call this the rising floor. Every useful machine absorbs the layer of work it can do better than people. The human contribution does not vanish. It moves upward, into judgement, selection, taste, and ethics, questions a machine cannot answer for you because they are not technical questions at all. That is where AI is heading now, into code, legal drafting, HR policy, marketing copy, the layer of execution that used to define a competent professional.