Automating the Wrong Thing
We keep measuring AI by how much it produces, not by whether what it produces matters.
A developer writes ten lines of code a day. AI writes ninety more. Productivity! But code is a liability. Every line you ship is a line you maintain, debug, secure, and rewrite. Writing more of it is accelerating in a direction that might be wrong.
Replace your support team with agents. Every ticket answered in seconds. Costs drop. But you are telling customers they will never speak to a human again. The ones who stay never needed help. The rest leave quietly. The churn shows up two quarters later.
Auto-reply to every email. You are technically present in every conversation. But the replies are indistinguishable from what anyone gets by pasting the thread into ChatGPT. Your voice disappears. You are contributing to nothing.
AI gets applied to the visible output while the part that creates value goes unexamined. A developer's value is the choices they make and the code they choose not to write. A support agent's value is the trust they build, not the ticket they close. Automating the output without understanding the value is erosion, not efficiency.
We could automate things before AI with macros, scripts, workflows and rule engines. What AI actually changes is the ability to operate in ambiguous, unstructured spaces. That is a new capability. We are wasting it on making the same old automation run slightly faster (and more expensive).
The question is not "what can we automate?" but "what is the right thing to augment?" Nobody knows that upfront! You have to build something, put it in front of real users, watch what happens, and iterate. The right application is discovered through experimentation, not declared by committee.
This is why CBK.AI is a prototyping platform first - a place to rapidly build, test, and iterate on AI systems until you find the augmentation that actually matters. The leverage is never where the obvious pitch says it is.
A practical note: the goal was never to automate more things. We have been doing that for decades. The goal is to augment the right thing. That requires experimentation and rapid prototyping, not another dashboard with an "add AI" button.