Why faster isn't always better with AI
The hidden cost of velocity in the wrong direction.
Speed is the easiest AI benefit to measure and the easiest to misread. A process that used to take a week now takes an hour. The slide writes itself. The problem is that nobody asked whether the process should have been running at all.
AI is particularly good at accelerating work that was already low-value. It will write more emails nobody reads, generate more reports nobody acts on, produce more variants of a bad offer. The output goes up, the outcome does not.
Velocity in the wrong direction is more expensive than slowness in the right one. It consumes attention, it crowds the inbox, it trains the organisation to equate activity with progress. And it is harder to walk back, because the dashboard looks good.
Before accelerating a process with AI, the honest question is whether you would still run that process if it took the same time as before. If the answer is no, speeding it up is the wrong intervention. Killing it is.
Fast is a feature. Direction is the strategy.
The decision: before you accelerate a process, decide whether it deserves to exist at the current speed.