I don't think AI removes the need for thinking.

If anything, it makes thinking more important.

The useful bit of AI isn't that it magically knows what to do. It doesn't. It misses context all the time. It doesn't always understand the business, the customer, the mood of the market, the small political things inside a team, or the strange little details that make a decision obvious to a human and invisible to a model.

Where AI is genuinely useful is in removing friction.

It can pull the data from ten different places before I would have even logged into the third tool. It can summarise a messy document. It can spot patterns. It can create a first draft. It can help build a small internal tool that nobody would have had time to build six months ago.

That matters.

Not because the work disappears, but because the waiting does.

The human still holds the context

The trap is assuming that faster means better.

Sometimes AI helps you move quickly in completely the wrong direction. It can make a bad idea look polished. It can turn a half-formed thought into something that sounds more certain than it deserves to be.

That's dangerous.

A person still needs to understand what matters, what the customer is actually trying to do, how the business makes money, what risks are worth taking and what information is missing.

AI can help with the work around the thinking. It can help create momentum. But the judgement still needs to sit with people who understand the context.

The boring work is the opportunity

I think the biggest wins are probably not in the glamorous use cases.

They're in the boring ones.

The weekly report. The campaign check. The spreadsheet that gets rebuilt every Monday. The repeated analysis. The manual QA. The copy-and-paste work that nobody enjoys but everyone accepts as part of the job.

Removing those tasks doesn't make people less valuable. It gives them more time to be valuable.

That's the bit I think gets missed.

Where my thinking is today

AI shouldn't be used to replace expertise. It should be used to give expertise more room to breathe.

The best use of AI is not always doing something new. Sometimes it's doing something painfully familiar with less friction, fewer handoffs and less waiting.

That might not sound as exciting as the future of work.

But it is probably where a lot of the real value is.