Current AI tools are cannibalizing your team’s bandwidth.
Your team is juggling context windows.
Worrying about compaction.
Switching models.
A/B testing prompts.
Trying to keep track of what tools are being called.
That is not AI’s promise, nor its potential.
In the early days of computing (and I do mean early), moving text between applications was a dark art. Many simple operations placed a heavy burden on the user. You had to remember a command, commit to an action and then specify what it applied to. On some systems, this required the user to have intricate knowledge of the system’s memory. Error recovery was brutal. Sound familiar?
Then copy and paste was invented. Select the text first. Then decide what to do with it. Paste it once, twice or never. Let the software manage the memory implications, not the user.
Your people have a task in mind. But they are forced to think about their prompt, its style, the context, the model, the availability of tools and plugins. The intent is in their head. The interface is demanding something else entirely.
We are in the modal editor phase of AI interaction. Powerful, but asking too much of the humans using it. And squandering bandwidth that could be used to add actual human intelligence to their work.
AI will have its copy and paste moment. The question is whether your organization is building workflows around the current friction or preparing for what replaces it.