AI Won't Replace You—It Will Empower You
I just spent 10 minutes doing what used to take me three weeks.
Early in my career, as a budding Associate Consultant at Bain & Company, I was assigned to help a cable company figure out why their customers were unhappy. My job was to comb through over 10,000 customer survey responses, sorting them into categories like "billing problems," "service outages," or "rude customer service." I then had to build endless spreadsheets and pivot tables to spot patterns and figure out why so many customers were canceling within their first month.
It was like being a detective, except instead of solving crimes, I was solving spreadsheet puzzles.
Fast forward to last week. I needed to understand why our partnership performance was declining across different regions. Instead of manually sorting through thousands of data points like my younger self would have done, I fed the partnership data into an AI system. Within minutes, it analyzed every partner interaction, identified the real drivers of poor performance (not just what correlated with it), and even suggested which specific changes would have the biggest impact.
What used to require weeks of manual detective work now happens with the click of a button. The AI doesn't just find patterns; it understands the actual causal relationships behind them. And instead of spending three weeks building spreadsheets, I spent those three weeks actually implementing the solutions.
Why This Changes Everything
The AI systems I'm seeing aren't just automation tools. They're strategic thinking partners that can identify why things happen (not just what happens), and then act on that understanding autonomously.
At Verizon, I spent weeks manually researching brand partners for our loyalty program. At Google, I built financial models from scratch to evaluate partnership deals. At Lemonade, I'd spend days analyzing which partnerships were actually driving results vs. just looking good on paper.
Now AI can do all of that analysis instantly, model hundreds of scenarios, and identify the best opportunities, while I focus on building relationships, navigating interpersonal conflicts, and making strategic decisions that actually require human judgment.
The Real Revolution
This isn't about AI replacing jobs. It's about AI eliminating the tedious parts of jobs so humans can focus on what we're uniquely good at.
Instead of spending 80% of my time on analysis and 20% on strategy, I can flip that ratio. Instead of being a human spreadsheet, I can be an actual strategist.
The people who embrace this shift will become exponentially more valuable. The people who fight it will be left behind trying to compete with machines at what machines do best.
And you can bet which path I am choosing.
