There’s a question I keep coming back to lately, one that’s been gnawing at me through every AI conversation I’ve had with business leaders, operators, and founders over the past year: What happens to companies that use AI to get more efficient at doing the wrong things?
It sounds like a philosophical question, but it’s actually quite practical. And the more I dig into it, the more I think the real risk of AI isn’t necessarily that it replaces people but rather that it accelerates a pattern many businesses have already been stuck in for decades: the slow drift from building something meaningful toward extracting as much value as possible from whatever you already built.
I got to explore this with Shawn Busse, founder and CEO of Kinesis, on a recent episode of Transform Your Workplace. Shawn is one of those rare thinkers who can connect a sculptor’s sensibility to a business strategist’s rigor, and what he had to say deserves a lot more airtime than a single podcast.
The Supply Shock No One Is Talking About
Shawn had been a skeptic about AI, like a lot of smart people. He’d seen enough Silicon Valley hype cycles to be wary. But an article from Lattice Work called “The Great Rotation” shifted something for him, and when he explained why, it clicked for me too.
The argument is this: for the past 20 years, the world has been massively over-investing in digital. Content marketing, SaaS tools, search engine optimization, social media, apps. The returns were enormous early on, but the space is now flooded. As Shawn put it, “We’ve invested so much, now there’s an oversupply, and AI has just turbocharged that.”
He saw this coming before AI entered the picture. When he was running SEO and content marketing back in the mid-2000s, he started watching quality decline as volume increased. Offshore writers, templated content, an arms race toward more rather than better. He got out of that space around 2017, not because it stopped making money, but because it had become “so uncreative” that he didn’t want to play the game anymore.
Now AI can produce infinite blog posts, infinite copy variations, infinite code. And the question stops being “how do we produce more?” and starts being “how do we stand out when everyone has the same machine?”
Shawn’s answer is that you can’t win by playing that game at all. The Lattice Work piece makes the case that the 2D world, the world of screens and digital content, is experiencing diminishing returns. The 3D world, real relationships, physical things, trust-based services, experiences that can’t be replicated at scale, is where scarcity and therefore value is heading.
The Creativity Crisis That Predates AI
This is where Shawn’s thinking gets genuinely important for business leaders. He’s diagnosing a much deeper problem. “Business is in a crisis of creativity,” he told me. “We spent 40-plus years optimizing around best practices. It’s really hollowed out our ability to think originally.”
His theory is that it starts on Wall Street. The most reliable way to satisfy quarterly earnings expectations isn’t to invent something new. Instead, it’s all about cutting costs, buying back stock, or trapping customers inside a subscription they can’t easily leave. He used ADP as an example: a $30 billion company with around 40% net income margins, revenues and profits climbing, and yet cutting employees and watching its stock slide. Profitable, yes, but not building anything that makes customers’ lives meaningfully better.
HP is another one. Once a company that started in a garage, driven by curiosity and invention, now it locks you into Smart Ink subscriptions and makes it genuinely painful to switch. “We’ve kind of reached its inevitable conclusion,” Shawn said, “which is that these companies suck. They’re not adding value to our lives.”
What’s striking is how this behavior flows downstream. The big companies optimize, so mid-market companies optimize to compete, so small businesses feel pressure to optimize too. Business schools produce graduates who are skilled at running systems, not questioning them. The result is a corporate ecosystem where creativity has been squeezed out slowly, methodically, and in many cases deliberately.
And now AI arrives. What does it wipe out first? The jobs that are already optimizable. Templated software engineering. Routine bookkeeping. Standard legal review. The work that got commoditized by Wall Street logic before AI ever showed up.
The $6 Million Man Problem
Shawn is not pessimistic about AI. What excites him is something more specific than the technology itself: it’s what curious, experienced people can do when they actually know how to use it.
He walked me through an analysis he ran for a client: he had a full team export their LinkedIn data over the course of a year and fed it into AI to examine what content was actually working and why. The insight came back fast: reach, engagement rates, and the patterns behind both, all mapped and plotted. “I could not have done that level of analysis in any reasonable period of time,” he said.
But here’s the thing he was careful to emphasize. A business owner who isn’t already strong in marketing wouldn’t necessarily know what questions to ask, what patterns to look for, or what to do with the findings. The AI is powerful, but the expertise has to come in the door first. He called it the “$6 Million Man phenomenon”: Steve Austin is still a human, he’s still got all his original knowledge and experience, but now he’s got superpowers layered on top.
The people who are going to win with AI are people who are genuinely curious, who ask good questions, who know how to dig down rabbit holes. “The value is proportional to my creativity and ability to ask good questions,” Shawn told me. “And that’s not being talked about enough.”
This reframes the workforce question considerably. The concern isn’t just “will AI take my job?” but “am I the kind of person who can actually leverage this tool?” The answer to that depends far less on technical skills than most people assume.
Blue Ocean Thinking as the Real Competitive Advantage
So what should leaders actually do? Shawn kept coming back to Blue Ocean Strategy, the framework built around the idea of creating uncontested market space rather than fighting over existing terrain.
The premise is simple but hard to execute: instead of competing in markets where everyone is fighting over the same customers with increasingly similar offerings, you create something genuinely new that makes the competition irrelevant. And Shawn’s point is that this kind of thinking, by definition, can’t be outsourced to AI.
“AI can’t tell you to do something that’s never been done before,” he said. “It’s a prediction model. It works from a base of existing knowledge.” The examples he loves to use are exactly the kind of ideas that no algorithm would have generated. An animal shelter in Missouri that brought kids in to read to the dogs, which calmed the animals, made them more adoptable, and gave kids a low-pressure environment to practice literacy. Or Lego partnering with Formula One to build full-scale Lego F1 cars that actually drove around the track. Nobody prompted a machine for those ideas. They came from people who were curious, playful, and willing to try something that had never been tried.
This is the rally cry Shawn keeps coming back to in his keynotes and client work: companies have to rebuild the muscle memory for creation. Not optimization, not incremental improvement, but actual creation. And most companies don’t have it anymore because it was the first thing squeezed out when efficiency became the only metric that mattered.
“You can’t have that one person save the day,” he said, referring to the founder who still holds all the creative energy while everyone else has been optimized into supporting roles. “You need multiple people thinking creatively. Like a studio. A music studio space where you’re working together and playing together and riffing and trying things.”
That’s uncomfortable for a lot of organizations. It looks different from a productivity dashboard, and it doesn’t produce predictable output on a quarterly timeline. But it’s the work that generates ideas AI can’t replicate, because those ideas don’t exist yet.
What This Means for Leaders Right Now
I want to be honest that nobody has a clean answer for where all of this is going. Shawn admitted as much, noting that even Anthropic’s CEO’s predictions deserve some skepticism alongside respect. This is genuinely uncharted, and overconfidence is a liability right now.
But a few things seem clear enough to act on.
First, using AI primarily to cut costs is a trap. Yes, AI can eliminate a lot of repetitive, low-value work, and that’s genuinely useful. But if cost reduction is the only strategy, you’re optimizing your way toward irrelevance. Kent Beck, a software engineer and thinker Shawn referenced, pushes back hard on the labor-replacement framing, arguing that new revenue, faster time to market, and entirely new business models are where the real AI opportunity lives.
Second, creativity is a business capability, not a personality trait. It needs resources, time, and protection from the constant pressure to produce measurable short-term returns. Relying on one person to carry all the creative weight leaves the rest of the organization with nothing to fall back on when that person is gone.
Third, the 3D world is getting more valuable, not less. Relationships, trust, customization, and white-glove service are not things AI can manufacture at scale. Companies like Xenium that compete on genuine human connection and industry-specific expertise are in a strong position, as long as they resist the pressure to commoditize themselves.
And finally, the people who thrive in this environment are going to be curious, communicative, and empathetic. Those aren’t soft skills in a pejorative sense. As Shawn put it, “prompting an AI tool is almost like an exercise in philosophy, communications, and empathy.” The humanities, the things we’ve been systematically defunding in education and business alike, are turning out to be exactly what this moment requires.
AI is a powerful tool. But it doesn’t supply the thing that actually makes a company worth working for or buying from. That still has to come from people who care enough to create something new.
Brandon Laws is a workplace culture and leadership enthusiast, host of the Transform Your Workplace podcast, and VP of Marketing and Product at Xenium HR.