I Think We’re Looking at AI Backwards
I had a conversation with another founder recently that stuck with me.
He spent about twenty minutes explaining how they were using AI across the company. Sales. Marketing. Product. Customer Success. It was all impressive.
Then he asked me, “What do you think?”
I said, “I think you’re looking at it backwards.”
He laughed.
“What do you mean?”
I told him that every company I’ve talked to over the last year seems to be asking the same question:
“How can our people use AI?”
It’s a good question.
I just don’t think it’s the most interesting one.
The more interesting question is:
“What is our AI teaching us about ourselves?”
Think about it.
If AI consistently sees customers getting stuck during onboarding, maybe the onboarding process isn’t as good as we thought.
If it notices that every deal over a certain size stalls during legal review, maybe Legal isn’t the bottleneck. Maybe Sales is bringing them in too late.
If AI starts recognizing that your best customer success managers all solve problems in remarkably similar ways, maybe you’ve uncovered a playbook nobody ever documented.
That’s what fascinates me.
We’ve been treating AI like another employee we need to train.
But eventually, every good employee starts teaching the company something too.
The new hire notices inefficiencies that veterans stopped seeing years ago.
The consultant asks, “Why do you do it this way?” and nobody has a good answer.
The intern accidentally points out that two departments are solving the same problem differently.
Fresh eyes are valuable.
Not because they know more.
Because they see things everyone else has learned to ignore.
I think AI is going to become those fresh eyes.
Not because it’s smarter than the organization.
Because it isn’t burdened by the organization’s assumptions.
That’s a subtle but important difference.
The companies that get the most value from AI won’t just ask it to automate work.
They’ll ask it to expose blind spots.
To recognize patterns humans stopped noticing.
To challenge processes that nobody has questioned in years.
That might be the biggest shift of all.
One day, AI stops being the student.
It starts becoming the mirror.
And sometimes, the most valuable thing a mirror can do is show us something we’ve stopped seeing.
