AI is a Mirror
[As this post was sitting in my drafts, Ethan Mollick published a deeply insightful post making a similar point. Go read that.] I’ve talked to a lot of companies about building AI agents, and I’ve noticed a strange pattern. You sit down with them, ready to talk workflows, pipelines, and agents, and you ask the simple question: “What do you want to automate?” And they don’t know. AI acts as a mirror. You bring it in, hoping it will solve your problems, but it just stands there and reflects your own organization back at you, asking: “So, what do you actually do here? What is your process? What is your workflow?”