Right now, we are in the messy middle.
Tools are improving quickly, but judgement, standards, and guardrails have not caught up everywhere. Some of what is happening is genuinely impressive. Some of it is half-baked. And some of it is going to cause real problems before it settles.
If you zoom out, a few patterns are starting to become clear.
AI will be everywhere, but mostly invisible. Built into systems, workflows, and products rather than being a headline feature. The novelty will wear off and it will just become part of how things work.
The good is maybe obvious.
Faster iteration. Lower cost of experimentation. Less manual admin. Better support coverage. Deeper insight and reporting, with the ability to improve continuously. Test, learn, adjust, repeat. As fast as you can get users in, the CPUs can keep up.
Used well, AI removes friction and frees people up to focus on higher-value work.
Security is going to be a massive issue.
Systems connected too quickly. Data shared too freely. AI trusted without enough understanding of what is happening in the backend. We will see some very public failures where speed wins over oversight.
The risks are just as real.
Security is going to be a massive issue.
Systems connected too quickly. Data shared too freely. AI trusted without enough understanding of what is happening in the backend. We will see some very public failures where speed wins over oversight.
Then there is trust.
If everything is AI-generated, people will notice. And in many cases, they will trust it less. We are already seeing this play out in the news and across platforms.
Real photography. Real people. Real voices. Humans in videos. These will win in areas where trust matters. Authenticity will become a differentiator, not a nice-to-have.
At the same time, there will be spaces where people lean into AI as a trust model. The thinking is that humans are biased, inconsistent, and error-prone. There is truth in that, too. It will be interesting and uncomfortable at times.
That tension is not going away.
Which is why trust sits at the core of all of this.
As volume increases, trust becomes more valuable. As speed increases, judgement matters more. And as everything becomes more automated, standing out becomes harder and more important at the same time.
We are heading into a world of more.
More content. More tools. More noise. More opportunity. Possibly more than at any point in history.
AI is not the strategy. It is an accelerant.
The real questions are still the same:
- Should we use it.
- Where does it help.
- Where does it hurt.
- And what does this do to trust.
Those questions are not new.
But the stakes are higher than they have ever been...