📨 Weekly digest: 28 2025 | The AI divide: builders vs. buyers of output
The fundamental truth that often gets lost in the noise of AI hype and fear
👋🏻 Hello, legends, and welcome to the weekly digest for week 28 of 2025.
For too long, the conversation around AI has been framed by fear of job displacement or the pursuit of marginal efficiencies. This is a profound miscalculation.
The real strategic imperative, for every decision-maker, every board member, and every startup founder, is not just how to use AI, but how to become an organization that fundamentally expands its output through AI.
Many companies are approaching AI as a tool to buy output – integrating a chatbot here, automating a process there, or using an AI marketing platform. This is the low-hanging fruit, offering incremental cost savings or slight improvements. But it's a dangerous trap. While these efforts might keep you afloat, they won't propel you forward.
The truly disruptive organizations, the ones that will dominate the next decade, are those that become AI-enabled builders of expanded output.
They leverage AI not merely to cut costs, but to:
Accelerate their core creative and productive processes: ship features faster, generate campaigns with unprecedented speed and personalization, or develop new products at a pace previously unimaginable.
Expand their analytical and strategic capabilities: Gaining insights so deep and fast that they effectively see around corners, predicting market shifts and customer needs before competitors even recognize them.
Amplify human potential: Freeing their most valuable talent from mundane tasks, allowing them to focus on innovation, complex problem-solving, and relationship building.
The true measure of AI adoption is not the cost saved, but output earned.
If your AI strategy is solely measured by cost reduction, you are missing the entire point. You're bringing a knife to a gunfight. The biggest upside of AI isn't doing the same things cheaper; it's doing orders of magnitude more, with greater intelligence and speed. This means:
For decision-makers, the focus must shift from achieving efficiency gains to expanding capabilities. How can AI allow your teams to produce 5x, 10x, or even 100x the strategic output they currently do?
For board members, it is about demanding to see not just ROI on cost savings, but a clear roadmap for how AI is fundamentally altering your organization's capacity for innovation, market penetration, and value creation. Are we building more, creating more, understanding more, faster?
For founders, it is an inherent advantage. Don't build a better mousetrap; build an AI-powered factory for mousetraps that can iterate and adapt at warp speed. Embed AI into your core product and operational DNA from day one to create a compounding output advantage.
The AI-first revolution isn't about replacing human workers; it's about fundamentally expanding the human-driven output of your organization.
Are you merely buying AI's output, or are you becoming a builder of unprecedented organizational capability?
Yael.
Yael on AI, my personal views
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📨 Weekly digest: 27 2025 | The trust mandate
👋🏻 Hello, legends, and welcome to the weekly digest for week 27 of 2025.
📨 Weekly digest
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