Sloppy Strategy Doesn’t Scale

Everyone keeps asking the same question in different ways:

“Is AI actually simplifying work… or are we just making a bigger mess, faster?”

Here’s the thing. AI can create leverage. Massive leverage. But only if you stop treating it like a toy, treat it like part of your workforce.

This week was not about theory, it’s what I’m watching happen in companies right now. Some are building real advantage. Most are just automating chaos.

Let’s start small. This is something that people always talk about, AI assisted writing.

AI is great. Obviously. And you totally should use it to help you write. I'm a big fan. BUT...

Everything is starting to sound the same. You can feel it when you read something.

It has a similar rhythm, some of the same pacing, some of the same buzzwords and formatting. It's like it's a different author but the same voice.

Don't get me wrong, it's readable and polished but it's also sometimes empty. AI writing has tells. It used to be obvious things like em dashes. Now it’s subtler patterns, but once you notice them, you can’t unsee them.

And no, the answer isn’t “don’t use AI.” That’s lazy advice from people pretending this wave isn’t here. The real skill now is coaching it. Forcing it to sound like you, not the internet averaged together.

So here are a few prompts worth experimenting with if you want AI to sound more like you and less like everyone else.

That “everything sounds the same” problem? It doesn’t stop at writing.

“Everyone uses AI to write resumes now, so the keywords don’t mean anything anymore.”

That was the most honest line from my conversation with Mark Hoge at DigitalHire .

Filtering resumes is just sorting noise now. Throwing AI at screening doesn’t fix it. It just speeds up the wrong work.

Signal only comes back through conversation. Let AI talk to candidates at scale. Let people explain how they actually work, what they want, and what kind of environment they won’t last in. Then let humans do the judging.

Now take that same broken system…and apply it into sales.

I now get one email a week from someone telling me how their AI SDR outbound pilot face-planted.

Every. Single. One. It's the same story.

Pipeline created? Zero. This is spam at scale. Congrats!

Honestly, I’m impressed some of these companies are still allowed to accept money.

Look, the truth is, cold outbound is one of the hardest problems you could possibly hand to AI. There is no signal, intent and no thought out timing. Just volume, automation, and hope.

It’s hilarious listening to teams explain these pilots: “We babysit the bots all week, then we have our weekly BS optimization meeting, tweak the copy again, and decide we need better data.” Congrats my friends, you didn’t replace SDRs. You created robot daycare.

If your AI SDR strategy starts with “let’s spam more people, faster,” I can save you the trouble right now. It won’t work. It never did.

AI didn’t magically make it work. I'm sorry, you just can’t brute-force strangers into your pipeline.

When AI pilots fail, most teams don’t rethink. They just add more tools.

A COO told me, “SaaS sprawl nearly broke our company. Will AI do the same?”

His last company had 72 vendors. 72 contracts. 72 point solutions, each handling one tiny, disconnected slice of the process.

It was miserable. Now ask yourself this. Is 72 AI agents from 72 different companies actually worse?

Yeah. It is.

And the companies that lose will do exactly that. One AI SDR from one vendor. Support from another. Recruiting from a third. Then ops. Demos. Follow-ups. Whatever looks shiny this week.

What you end up with isn’t leverage. It’s a Frankenstein org held together by APIs, Slack alerts, and wishful thinking. The companies that win won’t build this mess. They’ll pick an agentic partner. From that partner, they’ll hire dozens of cloud employees.

People keep saying AI simplifies things. Maybe. But watched up close, it’s just as good at multiplying chaos if you make the same structural mistakes again. And once that sprawl sets in, nobody ever believes it was their plan.

One thing is becoming obvious, business models are already outdated

BPOs are cooked. What’s wild is they don’t even know it yet. They don’t have to die. But they’re going to… if they keep pretending nothing changed.

Every conversation sounds the same. Nearshore. Offshore. Labor arbitrage with a cleaner slide deck. Like it’s still 2016 and nobody noticed the ground moved.

Here’s the pattern:

That’s not strategy you guys, its denial. I promise you your customers already know the model is breaking. Headcount-only BPOs are slower, more expensive, and harder to scale every quarter. That’s not really an opinion, it's just the numbers.

The irony is the future isn’t all AI or all offshore. It’s a mix. A mix you’re supposed to design, not avoid.

If that isn’t part of your core offering, you’re not really being a partner, you're more like a temporary staffing stopgap with a shorter shelf life every day.

And no, you don’t get to “wait and see.” Your customers won’t. They’ll just replace you behind your back.

So stop pretending this is optional. Build it. Lead with it. Own the mix.

If all AI does in your company is add volume, tools, and motion, then nothing actually changed. You just sped up the parts that were already broken and made them harder to unwind later.

Every example above is the same failure wearing a different costume. Writing that sounds fine but says nothing. Hiring that filters faster and learns less. Sales that scales activity and calls it progress. Vendors stacked on top of vendors until nobody knows who owns the outcome.

AI doesn’t simplify work by default. It exposes whether you ever bothered to design how work should run in the first place.

And once it’s running at speed, you don’t get to pretend the mess was an accident.

That’s it for today. Connect with me on Linkedin if you actually want to understand what an Autonomous Organization looks like in the real world.