Managing at the Speed of AI

On one side, is a new student who has never shipped anything meaningful with AI. They’re staring at a blank prompt box, not sure where to start.

On the other side, a director is shipping three new skills a week, quietly compounding what their twenty-person team can do. A quarter’s worth of work, done by the end of the month.

Same AI. Same industry. Same credits available to both. That gap is the largest juxtaposition I’ve seen in 31 years in technology.

I grew up on the first Apple computers, so the shape of this isn’t new. There’s always an adoption curve. Some people sprint, some people wait, most people sit somewhere in the messy middle. What’s different this time isn’t the curve. It’s the raw speed of what’s coming at us. 

So if you’re feeling underwater, I’m sending you a hug. You’re behind because the thing you’re chasing keeps moving. We’re all feeling it, me particularly this week.

We can’t put AI back in the box. So we adapt.

Here are my top three suggestions if you’re struggling to keep up.

The single biggest predictor of which side of my split-screen you land on isn’t talent or budget. It’s reps.

The director shipping skills isn’t smarter than the student. They’ve just got their hands on the keyboard. They’ve built the muscle. McKinsey put real numbers behind this. Their research found the biggest barrier to scaling AI isn’t the employees. It’s us leaders, who aren’t steering fast enough. Only 1% of companies rate themselves “mature” on AI. Not 1% of the laggards. 1% of everyone.

Here’s the trap we managers fall into: we approve AI. Fund the licenses, bless the pilot, put it on the roadmap, and then they never actually use it ourselves. As one sharp post I read this week put it, “adoption is not absorption.” Buying Claude seats is not the same as building capability.

AI collapses how long it takes each person to make something, the bottleneck doesn’t disappear. It moves. And it usually moves to us. I’m often the bottle neck.

Harvard Business Review framed this perfectly: as execution gets cheap, “the pace of progress is limited by how quickly managers can offer feedback.”

One leader they quoted said it best. “Every 30 minutes, someone creates something I have to look at.” Your team got faster. Your review queue didn’t.

You can’t out-review a team that’s now ten times faster at producing. So the job has to change. Less editor-in-chief, more strategic guide. Spend your scarce attention on where the team is going and why. Stop policing every what. Set the direction clearly enough that people can self-correct without routing every decision through you.

This is the hardest shift, because it asks managers to give up the part of the job that used to feel like adding value: being the final set of eyes. That instinct is now the bottleneck.

The dirty secret of the productivity boom is that a lot of the new “output” is ai slop.

Researchers at Stanford, BetterUp, and BCG gave it a name: workslop. AI-generated work that looks polished but has nothing behind it. In their survey, 40% of employees got hit with workslop in the last month. Each instance cost almost two hours to untangle. For a 10,000-person company, that’s roughly $9 million a year evaporating into work that looked done.

More volume isn’t the win. It can actively be the problem. If your team is shipping twice as much and half of it needs cleanup, you didn’t get faster; you just moved the work downstream and called it progress.

We must change what we reward. We can't celebrate the person who generated the most. Celebrate the person who shipped the thing that was actually right, who killed the bad draft early, who used AI to get to good faster. Define what “good” looks like, before the work starts. That definition is now one of the most valuable things I can do to help my team.

Turn AI Into Your Most Powerful Marketing Teammate

Put AI to Work Across Your Marketing Strategy. In this hands-on course, you will learn how to confidently use tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Descript to plan, create, and scale content across copy, images, and video.

You will leave with practical frameworks and real experience generating marketing assets you can apply immediately. Led by Alec Newcomb, this course is built for marketers, leaders, and business owners who want to improve efficiency, drive growth, and stay ahead with AI.

If you want to go deeper this weekend, here’s what I’d actually put in front of a manager trying to catch up.

None of this requires you to become the director shipping three skills a week by Friday. My ask is to get in your reps, accept that the job is changing under you, and keep your team from drowning in workslop.

You’re not behind. You’re early. We all are.

— Alec