If you run a business, pretty much any kind of business, the one thing you should do about AI is stop and think: what new problems can you find for your organisation?
Because whatever value you’re creating today by solving today’s problems, some form of AI will most likely be able to generate shortly. Faster, cheaper, and without you. Bolting AI onto your current process buys you a few months of advantage at best. Then everyone has the same tools, and you’re back where you started.
The real opportunity is the other direction. AI lets you solve problems you couldn’t touch before. Problems that were too expensive, too slow, too specialised, or simply unimagined. Those are where the next decade of value is going to come from, and almost nobody is looking for them yet.
David Deutsch puts it well in The Beginning of Infinity: problems are inevitable, but problems are soluble. And the reward for solving one is finding a better one. That’s how knowledge grows. If you’re using AI to keep solving the same problem you’ve been solving for a decade, you’re not making progress. You’re just going faster on a road that might not lead anywhere.
This is a philosophical question, not a technical one. And philosophy is uncomfortable because it doesn’t come with an SDK.
I noticed this recently during a conversation with a potential candidate for a job. I started asking myself: how good of a philosopher is this guy? If I were shut in a room thinking about the future, is he somebody I want with me? That’s the test now. Anyone can execute. Fewer people can sit with a hard question long enough to find a better one.
So leaders in any organisation should create space for thinking. Put your domain experts in a room with people who understand where AI is heading, and ask: what couldn’t we do before that we can do now? The easy problems are already solved, or about to be. The interesting ones are still waiting.
Stop. And think. Then build.