Hello! 👋
It's Thursday, 23rd April 2026. Hello and welcome back to Bold Efforts!
The productivity story is mostly right. Work is faster. Output is higher. Costs are coming down. What that story does not explain is why more and more organizations feel like something important is getting worse even as everything measurable gets better.
The meeting exists because you cannot see inside someone's head.
Neither can the deck, the status update, the strategic framework, or the quarterly review. Every management tool ever invented is a proxy for something invisible: whether the people in an organization are actually thinking clearly about the right things.
These proxies were never great. A long document has always been padded. A well-attended meeting has always been able to produce nothing. But there was friction. Producing something that looked like serious thinking required at least some serious thinking. That constraint made the proxies noisy and imperfect. But they were still useful as signals, if only just.
AI removed the constraint. That is the thing most organizations have not yet reckoned with.
A thirty-page strategy document now takes an afternoon. A competitive analysis that once required interviews and a full day of real synthesis can be assembled in two hours. Meeting summaries, project plans, stakeholder briefs: all fast, all fluent, all formatted correctly. The things that used to require thought can now be generated without it. And they look identical.
This is not a story about lazy employees. Most people using these tools are trying to do their jobs well, and the tools are genuinely useful. The problem is structural and sits one level higher than individual behavior. The measurement system organizations built to evaluate thinking was calibrated on a friction that no longer exists. And almost no one has noticed, because the output keeps coming.
Every manager reading a document is now asking a question they never had to ask before, usually without realizing it: did someone actually think this through, or did something generate it? Most of the time they cannot tell. So they fall back on what they have always fallen back on: volume, format, apparent thoroughness. The promotions still go to the person producing the most visible output. The meetings multiply. The documents multiply. The sense that something important is being avoided grows harder to name and easier to dismiss.
I have felt this from both sides. I suspect you have too.
What makes it hard to fix is that the old proxies did not fail catastrophically. They were always imperfect. They just became worthless almost overnight, and organizations have not built anything to replace them. The gap between an employee who thinks carefully and one who generates fluently used to be visible in the work. Now it is not. Which means evaluation systems that were already flawed are now measuring almost nothing.
The replacement is not a new tool. It is a harder question, asked consistently.
Not: how much did you produce? But: what did this change?
Not: did you synthesize the landscape? But: what did you learn that you did not already know, and what did you do differently because of it?
These questions cannot be answered with a document. They require someone who is willing to keep asking them even when the deck is polished and the room looks productive and everyone is very busy.
That person has always been more valuable than the one who produces the most. The difference is that the gap between them is now wide enough to reshape organizations, not just teams.
The companies that come through this decade well will not be the ones that used AI to produce more. They will be the ones that used AI to free up space for the work no model can do: the judgment call that requires someone's name on it, the decision that requires owning what happens next, the question that makes a room uncomfortable because it demands a real answer instead of a formatted one.
That kind of work has always been the point. Everything else was always just the proxy.
The question worth sitting with is not whether AI is changing your organization. It is whether the thing you are currently using to measure good work is still measuring anything real. Thank you for reading.
Best,
Kartik
I write Bold Efforts every week to think clearly about where work and life are actually headed, not where headlines say they are. If you want these essays in your inbox, you can subscribe here.