Why Smart People Make Bad AI Decisions
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Why Smart People Make Bad AI Decisions
Most people treat AI like any other software purchase: sign up, watch a tutorial, hope it sticks. But AI is different — the tools evolve monthly, the value comes from how you change your work, not from the tool itself.
You read about a tool that “uses RAG pipelines to ground LLM outputs in your proprietary data.” What does that actually mean for your Tuesday afternoon? If you can’t translate a tool’s description into a specific outcome for your business, you’ll buy it for the wrong reasons and drop it when it doesn’t magically solve an undefined problem.
The fix: Before you sign up for anything, finish this sentence: “This will help me [specific outcome] by [specific mechanism].” If you can’t finish it without using the vendor’s marketing language, you don’t understand what you’re buying yet.