AI has already reduced the effort of analysis and writing, but people still maintain continuity. We make business decisions, coordinate AI, move information and check results.
AI improves efficiency, but there is a ceiling: the amount of context one person can manage, changes they can track and results they can check still limits overall output.
AI can already do many things, and will do more, yet it remains dependent on people.
Why? Because people are currently the only carriers of context. AI does not know what we want, how our workflow operates or which capabilities should be combined into a result.
Goals, workflows and capability choices live in our heads. AI is a component executing passively; people assemble the components into a machine.
AI capabilities are growing exponentially, while our attention, memory and coordination capacity remain limited.
Unless we externalize what is in our heads, we cannot keep pace with AI development. However capable AI becomes, one person's mind can remain the whole system's bottleneck.
I now think the most important thing is a framework for organizing information: how should we organize the information, goals and everything else in our minds?
Only when this information becomes accessible to AI can it understand our goals and workflows, make decisions autonomously and carry out what we need.
We can outsource the capability layer to AI and wait for improvements. Context is different: it must be drawn out of people. It is the part requiring sustained human investment and the core asset.
Externalizing context takes a process, though. We know more than we can articulate, and we need real feedback.
Thanks for reading.