AI Didn't Steal Our Greatness. AI Didn't Steal Our Jobs.
A Plea From Operating by John Brewton to Stop Complaining and Blaming
A cultural meltdown is underway. Platforms overflow with “AI slop” (generic, polished-but-soulless content churned out by models). Creators are countering by flaunting the “100% human-made” badge, celebrating tYPos and rough edges as proof of authenticity. We’re trying to make imperfection a luxury. Definitely been tried before. We’re romanticizing the mess in some desperate attempt to assign value to the work we have spent our lives “mastering” before everything becomes a commodity. We’re struggling.
We’re having a tantrum. We’re not outraged because AI produces slop. We’re furious because AI held up a mirror, revealing the mediocrity of our work, the inconsequential nature of our perspectives, and how easily we are being replaced. Derivative ideas, dressed up as intellectual or recycled takes masquerading as insight, don’t push us forward. Safe prose propped up by hustle-porn narratives is worthless. AI churns out cleaner, faster versions of the same average output we’ve produced for years, and suddenly the emperor has no clothes.
In all seriousness, I’d love to have the perfect infomercial product or Shark Tank ready, consumer-craze item to market across Faebook, Instagram and TikTok right about now.
We’re children throwing tantrums because a tool outperforms our painstaking craft without breaking a sweat. We’re clinging to scarcity in an era of abundance.
Pre-AI, companies had a mediocrity problem. High barriers (credentials, experience requirements, organizational gatekeeping) protected average performance. You could grind for years in finance, operations, marketing, or strategy, produce something “good enough,” and call it expertise because the playing field was gated.
Effort became the metric, not innovation or insight.
As AI enables companies to decouple revenue growth from headcount expansion, organizations are creating “good enough” at zero marginal cost while eliminating healthcare costs and finding a hundred other ways to reduce expense, making “good enough” more valuable than it has ever been in corporate history. It’s a founder’s dream, an investor’s paradise, and a tiny would-be-disruptor-competing-on-price’s fantasy.
Your meticulously formatted financial models look useless when a well-prompted question solves for the variable you missed in a matter of seconds.
Your strategic memo (annual review deck), painstakingly researched over weeks, can be drafted in minutes.
Your market analysis, your operational review, your customer segmentation, all reproducible with the right prompts.
I spent nearly twenty years learning how to do all of these things precisely and with great care. I was paid well to execute these tasks. And yes, all of that work positively informs my ability to prompt systems to generate these outputs today, but let’s be honest, I wasn’t that good, the work wasn’t that hard to master and any real point of differentiation is dissapearing by the hour.
The commercial value of average is crashing across our organizations, markets, universities, hopes, and dreams. It’s time to learn something new, do something more, have a different dream. You’re probably wasting your time to think what you’ve been “exceptional” at doing to this point is going to hold its value moving forward.
This pattern repeats with every technological leap, but AI accelerates it brutally. Ethan Mollick, Wharton professor and author of Co-Intelligence, captures it:
“Whatever you are best at, you are very likely better than the best LLM at that same skill... but it still can’t get you to the top 1%, or even top 20%, of human performance.”
AI exposes the gap between our self-perceived elite status and reality. Most of us weren’t operating at peak human potential in our roles. We were coasting on organizational friction, protected by information asymmetry and process complexity.
If your strategic thinking can be prompted into existence, maybe it wasn’t that interesting. If your analysis can be replicated by someone with no domain expertise and a good AI prompt, maybe you were just following patterns. Random employees armed with AI now scale mediocre outputs effortlessly across functions, drowning the field. But for those willing to look in the mirror, this is all liberating.
Voices from the front lines of tech and academia are calling this out. Mollick emphasizes integration over fear in his work at Wharton’s Generative AI Labs: “Cyborgs blend machine and person, integrating the two deeply. Bits of tasks get handed to the AI, working in tandem.” This applies whether you’re writing, analyzing data, modeling scenarios, or solving operational problems. He describes overcoming blocks with AI: “In an instant, I had the paragraph written... it gave me options and pathways forward.” This is an amplification of what you’re actually capable of beyond rote execution.
Marc Andreessen goes further in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, attacking the scarcity mindset fueling anti-AI backlash: “We are told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology. We are told to be pessimistic.” He champions abundance instead: “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential.” On AI: “We are literally making sand think.” His 2026 outlook: AI reshapes everything, with costs collapsing and sophistication exploding. Mediocrity gets crushed across all business functions as progress, the pace of change, time to scale, and the resources required to scale are redefined.
Andrew Ng frames AI as a transformative infrastructure, not an apocalypse: “Just as electricity transformed almost everything 100 years ago, today I actually have a hard time thinking of an industry that I don’t think AI will transform in the next several years.” The analogy holds, AI is the the present rewiring of work itself. “Despite all the hype and excitement about AI, it’s still extremely limited today relative to what human intelligence is,” he notes. The real limit is us, not the technology. The question isn’t whether AI can do your job, it’s whether you’ve been doing work that deserves to survive. Please stop thinking about, talking about, and writing about AI in terms of the work you’ve done, and start looking towards the functions, expertise and know-how you’ve not yet developed that you neeed add to your toolbox.
Marketers should learn to think like a cost-controlling Ops empresario.
Directors of Operations should add CFO-grade capacity to their analytical lenses.
A Distribution Center Manager should be optimizing for sales growth along with inventory control.
Stop hiding behind “experience” or “human judgment” as if tenure alone proves value. AI isn’t here to replace us, it’s here to humiliate our complacency and force real excellence. Integrate it ruthlessly. Become the cyborg Mollick describes, wielding AI to shatter the limits that kept you executing tasks instead of solving problems.
The future isn’t more reports, more meetings, more process documentation; it’s profoundly better thinking. Strategic insights that break industry molds. Operational innovations that reshape how work gets done. Customer understanding that shifts entire go-to-market approaches. We’re building a hyper-human workplace where mediocre execution dies and genuine problem-solving explodes in abundance. As Andreessen writes, “We believe technological progress therefore leads to material abundance for everyone.”
Clinging to “the way we’ve always done it” is like refusing the spreadsheet for “authentic” manual calculation, small-minded in any era demanding boldness. In my own work scaling companies, I’ve felt the mirror’s sting: processes I thought were sophisticated have been exposed as merely complicated. Strategic frameworks can easily become pattern-matching exercises dressed up in jargon.
The challenge: Stop defending your average performance. Invite AI into your workflow. Prompt aggressively, iterate brutally, ship relentlessly. Expect the same commitment from everyt member of your team. Use it to expose which parts of your job were always rote execution masquerading as expertise, then focus on the parts that actually require human creativity, judgment, and vision. The defenders of mediocrity will stay replaceable. The rest of us will get started on something real, new, better, bolder and bigger.
AI showed our flaws. Now, what are you going to do about it?
AI showed our flawss. Now, what are you going to do about it?
AI showed our flaws. nOow, what are you going to do about it?
AI — showed our flaws. now what are you going to do about it?
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- j -
John Brewton documents the history and future of operating companies at Operating by John Brewton. He is a graduate of Harvard University and began his career as a Phd. student in economics at the University of Chicago. After selling his family’s B2B industrial distribution company in 2021, he has been helping business owners, founders and investors optimize their operations ever since. He is the founder of 6A East Partners, a research and advisory firm asking the question: What is the future of companies? He still cringes at his early LinkedIn posts and loves making content each and everyday, despite the protestations of his beloved wife, Fabiola, at times.
John, I really appreciate how difficult and important this read is. Many people probably knew that they were coasting in their roles and then got extremely annoyed when AI came along and showed that up. However, I wonder if there's a way that we can encourage people to embrace the opportunities that AI creates to be more creative and free in their roles or future roles, rather than, as you say, bemoan the fact that it's automating aspects of their jobs that they were probably never excited about in the first instance.
So there won't be 100s of millions of people spending hours in booths call handling and doing data input whilst customers burn time in queues ? What new vision of the world will replace this dreamscape we live in?