Every industry will be transformed by AI. Some will evolve. Others will disappear. New ones will be built from scratch. That’s not a prediction. It’s already in progress. The only question that matters now isn’t whether AI will reshape your business. It’s what position you’ll hold when it does.
Most CEOs are playing AI like a defense game. Automate the reports. Trim the headcount. Speed up the support queue. Squeeze a few more points of margin out of the existing business. Check the AI box. Move on.
AI tools like Lovable, Bolt, Vercel, and Replit have done something remarkable: they’ve made software creation nearly frictionless. A founder with an idea and no engineering background can have a working app in twenty minutes. A competitor can replicate your core feature set by Friday afternoon.
I work with executives and founders on AI transformation. I sit in the boardrooms. I see the decks. I hear the talking points. And I’ve noticed a pattern: the more senior the room, the more comfortable everyone is with comfortable lies.
Not malicious lies. Comfortable ones. The kind you tell yourself when the alternative, actually confronting what’s happening, feels too disruptive, too uncertain, too threatening to the org chart you’ve spent years building.
There’s a question I left open in a previous post. I argued that the customer should always have a seat at the table, and that every decision should be traceable back to a specific human whose life it improves. And I meant it.
There’s a conversation happening in boardrooms right now that goes something like this:
“Are we using AI?”
“Yes, absolutely. The team has ChatGPT.”
And everyone nods. Box checked. Initiative launched. Disruption avoided.
I was in a meeting when I realized what was happening. The team was excited. Animated, even. Talking over each other about tools, models, infrastructure, and new capabilities. Someone kept using the word “cool.”
