Tools change how people work. A doctor with a stethoscope can diagnose better than one without.
That’s a useful way to think about AI.
At Aylmer Anderson and Fear & Greed, we use AI every day.
Sometimes, it is doing work that used to take time and attention. It collects attachments from emails, conducts research, moves information between formats and cleans up the strange fonts Sean can introduce by cutting and pasting across documents.
It saves time by handling low value, mechanical jobs.
But that is only one kind of gain.
Sometimes, the AI doesn’t reduce work but does sharpen the judgment of the person doing it.
In our world, that means pressure-testing logic, finding recurring themes across multiple conversations and documents, finding evidence to support an argument, checking if a claim is supported by source material and so on.
Thinking about these types of gains separately matters because the economics of each is different.
When AI handles a routine task, work becomes cheaper.
That sounds useful but an organisation can only capture that value in two ways: either people do better work with the time they’ve freed up, or it employs fewer people.
If the hours that AI saves mean you just spend longer at lunch, from your employer’s perspective nothing much has changed.
But things change when AI strengthens your judgement and decision quality. Work becomes worth more, not less.
That is a distinction we should care more about.
Yes, it is worth using AI to automate routine work.
But also use the time you get back to push harder into work where the tool raises the value of your judgement.
There’s not much point in building your identity around the part of your job that AI just made cheap and quick. Those are efficiency gains your employer can enjoy without you.
The same trap applies at an organisational level.
Much of AI usage in organisations right now is letting people draft emails and write documents.
That’s fine, but teams that use AI to raise the quality of thinking, evidence and decisions — not just the speed of tasks — are the ones that create value.