Are You Artificially Intelligent?
There's no shortage of content telling you how to use AI better. Prompting tips. Productivity hacks. "I replaced my entire team with ChatGPT and here's what happened." We are, collectively, drowning in it.
So let's talk about something else: the specific, quietly embarrassing ways smart professionals are tripping over AI right now. Not because they're technophobes per se. Because they're enthusiasts.
Outsourced Judgment | Your Strategy Has a Problem
A good strategist engages with the future. With ambiguity, with pattern recognition, with a room full of people who have lived experience and something to lose. That's not something an LLM scraped from last month's Medium roundup can replicate.
And yet. There's a growing tendency to outsource strategic thinking to AI - to treat a well-structured output as a well-reasoned position. The tools can be genuinely useful here, especially for structured frameworks and an initial stab at horizon scanning. But the moment you stop interrogating the output, you've stopped doing strategy and started doing transcription.
The subtler version of this is what I'd call synthetic conviction: the quiet confidence that settles in when an answer arrives fluently formatted and footnoted. It feels earned. It isn't. No amount of bullet points makes up for the judgment that should have gone into the question.
Artificially Intelligent
This is my preferred term for the colleague who doesn't share your area of expertise but enjoys the feeling of forwarding you a poorly prompted output with "you should really take a look at this."
“Here's a multi-page document I generated. I haven't read it. I think it's relevant to your work.” It would probably take you forty-five minutes to figure out it isn't - and a little more time to figure out how to respond.
Artificially intelligent colleagues mean well. They're excited. But enthusiasm without judgment is just noise with better formatting.
Wonder-Lock and the Thousand Doors Problem
This one is subtler, and I think it's the most widespread AI challenge I'm seeing right now.
Once you get genuinely comfortable with AI - once you start getting better results and understanding what it can actually do - something counterintuitive happens. The possibilities don't feel liberating. They feel paralyzing.
It can enhance my productivity in small ways. Sure. But what if it could transform everything I do? What if it could replace a whole function? What if it could cure my mental load? What if, what if, what if?
I have two terms for this. Wonder-lock is when you stop actually engaging because the possibilities are too large to navigate - frozen at the threshold instead of walking through. The Thousand Doors Problem is its hyperactive cousin: opening every door at once, starting something in each room, finishing nothing.
If you were online in the early 2000s, you remember this feeling. You had four free email accounts and three blogs. You were very busy going nowhere.
The antidote isn't to scale back your ambition. It's to pick a door.
Ultimately, the professionals navigating AI well right now aren't the ones using it most. They're the ones who've gotten comfortable with a single unglamorous question: what's this actually for? The tools will keep multiplying. That question won't get easier. But it's still the only one worth asking.
Ellie Hearne is the founder of Pencil or Ink, a consulting and coaching practice working with leadership teams on culture, strategy, and innovation. She leads Oxford's AI-Driven Business Transformation Executive Programme as Head Instructor and has spent the better part of her career helping purposeful leaders think more clearly under pressure. She is based in Brooklyn, New York, and has not yet been replaced by an AI - though she had some AI help writing this bio.