Ep 143 AI: AI Isn't a Tool Problem. It's a Culture Problem.

Four years into running CRZY, Stephen has watched AI go from an interesting experiment to an organizational crisis that almost nobody is naming correctly. The problem isn't which model you're using. It's not your stack, your workflow, or whether you've got the right prompts. The problem is culture — and most leaders are treating it like a hardware upgrade.

In this episode, Stephen breaks down the most urgent shifts he's seeing inside teams and companies right now: why being "output drunk" is quietly destroying careers and brands, why speed is the new debt, why the organizational pyramid is flipping — and what happens to an entire generation of creative professionals if we don't start solving for that. He also gets into the practical: what you review in meetings, how you hire, what you kill, and why pre-mortems need to replace post-mortems before it's too late.

This isn't a conversation about AI tools. It's a conversation about survival — and it's one almost nobody is having yet.

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Transcript

Cold Open: CRZY Turns 4 & The Real AI Problem

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It's been an interesting week for me this week. And the reason why is because Crazy, that's my agency, I started four years ago this week. And I've been doing a lot of reflecting and a lot of thinking. Because over that four years, I've been big and heavy into AI from the very beginning. I just I thought it was going to be a tool that was going to change things. I saw a different way of building a company. And one of the things that I've definitely learned through that journey is that the adoption of AI and the successful and impactful adoption of AI, it's not a technology problem. It's a cultural problem. And I think that's what I want to talk about today is what are the most common problems and some of the solutions that I've found to this that I think are going to become real issues for your career, for your team, for your company that almost nobody is thinking about and talking about. And a lot of unintended consequences are starting to happen that we really need to slow down and think about. So that's what we're going to talk about today. So welcome to episode 143 of the Crazy One Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Stephen Gates. This is a show where we talk about creativity, leadership, and all those other things that matter to creative people. Now, as always, appreciate it. Leave a review, share the show with your friend, talk about this stuff at work, helps get the word out there. That way I know people are actually listening. But that's where I want to start today. So in the last episode, we talked about what I'm seeing as this epidemic of plausible noise. Plausible meaning that we now have the tools that let you produce something that looks like expertise without maybe necessarily the thinking that goes behind it. That we're all going to find out real quick who sounds smart and who is smart. And noise in that, you know, again, what is getting produced, it's not one bad thing, it's not embarrassing, it's not obviously wrong, it's plausible. And it's this kind of low-level hum of this almost right work that's kind of going on in the background. And then the problem with that is that we're seeing this kind of collapsing of accountability, a devaluing of expertise. And for me, it's this fear of this almost lowest common denominator culture where we're going to value speed and volume over quality and impact. And I think it's already happening. It's already here. This isn't something that is just theoretical. This is happening every day. And I think that that's the thing that I'm so afraid of is that I've seen it in my work and my teams. And I think as I work with a lot of other clients, it's that they aren't aware of what's going on. And I'm afraid it's going to be way too late by the time you realize it and the impact has manifested. And so that's what I want to do is I want to build on, we start with plausible noise. Let's talk about a bunch of the other issues that I'm seeing. And the thing I want to do is to really sort of start with what I think for a lot of us is we need to realign over what is the new and successful unit of work. Now, for a long time on this show, I have talked about how too many companies confuse an output for an outcome. This is the challenge of designing creativity is that what we do is both an output and an outcome. Most of us are too often defined by the output, right? They want a design, they want a copy deck, they want a video, a photo, something. But now that concept is going to get taken to a whole new level and go out a completely new door because now every department and every company is going to be subjected to this. That right now we tend to be output drunk, right? We go into Claude, we go into ChatGPT, we go into whatever the LLM of your choice is, and we get a huge, almost fire hose-like output. Could be a deck, could be an email, could be, you know, 50 headlines. You know it when you see it, right? When somebody sends you the document, they send you the thought, they send you the response, and it's just way too much. But right now we are all output drunk. We are all so happy that we can output this stuff that again, we aren't necessarily stopping to look at what is the outcome. I'd have a conversation this morning with one of my clients about how, like, look, there's a number of people in their organization who are and who want to remain subject matter experts. They are people who want to be able to have their opinion count. They want to know what is going on, they want to be looked at as an authority. And they are doing everything within their power, seemingly, to completely undermine that. Because the content that they are putting out there, they are focused on the output. They're producing AI slop. The imageries that they are doing looks like really bad AI. The post that they're doing is a bunch of generic content. That their intention to look like an expert, they are prioritizing speed and volume, and they're completely going to destroy their own brand, but they're gonna, but they can do it quickly, so somehow it feels like an accomplishment. That's just one example of what I'm talking about of where we're conflating an output for an outcome. That just because you can do it quickly, just because you can do something that you couldn't do before, create an image, write code, make a piece of music, whatever that is, again, it the output is not the point. It's the outcome that we need to do. And so, again, with all of this, I think it's pretty easy to point out the problem, but to tangibly kind of give you some things I think you need to think about. I think one, we all need to start really changing what gets reviewed in meetings. That this is not necessarily about just reviewing the output, which is what most status meetings and other things are, but we need to really start reviewing the thinking. We need to start reviewing the strategy. We need to not just review the output, but again, look at the out, again, how did we get here? And what is the actual output and the outcome of this going to be? And for that reason, I think, like in a lot of cases, I'm trying to actively kill status updates, right? Because again, that is not highlighting the right things. It is focusing on the output, not the outcome. I'm much more interested in going over, for lack of a better term, this isn't the right one. I haven't found the right one yet. But I want to review like a decision log. What are the decisions we are making? Why are we making them? What is going into what the thinking is that is there, not just sort of fixating and fetishizing on what that output is. But I think also from a company perspective, and this is gonna maybe be one of the harder shifts, is that we need to start promoting on judgment, not on output. And look, you probably all just thought of somebody. I know I can think of people that I know have had very robust careers, very successful careers, with no discernible skills, but kind of like stealing the right work and kissing the right ass candidly. And that again, they have no discernible skills, no discernible judgment. They've just been focusing on their output. And this is where I fear for so many creatives, and have talked about it for the better part of 10 years, and we'll probably talk about it for the next however long I'm around to keep doing this, is that again, whenever you are your value is based just on your output, it is such a tenuous and delicate position to be in about what that real value is. But again, I think we need to start to think about that. We also need to really start to look at speed as being what I'm thinking of as like the new debt, right? Everyone is racing to ship faster. And the thing that I'm seeing in too many cases is that like creating bad ideas faster isn't an advantage. And the best way that I would continue to try to approach this is that we need to continue to be slow and deliberate with the top of the process, the top of the funnel, however you want to think about it. And you can really speed up 5x, 10x, the back part of it, and to be able to speed up that sort of thing. And I think the leaders who slow down at the right moments are absolutely going to outperform the ones who are just optimizing for speed and volume. Because again, that's the thing, is it's doing quality at speed, it's having impact at scale. That's what the goal of this should be. But I think that for so many of us, the ability to just go quickly is not going to be the advantage we think it is. And so, here again, the things that I've learned that I'm encouraging people to do, I think one is that I've really embraced the fact that like pre-mortems for me are the new postmortems. I talked about that years ago in the design ethics episode that nobody listened to. 10 years of the show, least popular episode I ever did was on design ethics. I get it, it's not fun. But again, as we are building AI models, as we are building predictive models, as we are doing things that are going to have a real impact on people, we need to start to think about what we do before we do it, not unleash it on the world, screw up our brand, screw up our company, expose a bunch of data, and then afterwards be like, whoops, we should have done that differently. And what a pre-mortem is, is how do you sit down and think about what are the guardrails? What are the things we want to do? What are the things we need to watch out for? What are the things we need to stay away from? What is the potential harm that we could do with what it is that we are about to do, with an agent we're about to use, with whatever that is, to make sure that we are teaching the model what those guardrails are, that we are clear on what those are. Because again, in systems thinking, it is much more about thinking about what you do before you build the system, not building it and then going, well, whoops, sorry, the house fell over. So, again, this idea that pre-mortems are the new post-mortems, that I think in a lot of cases the roadmap is going to need to become much more of what I would describe as like a kill list. Because in the era of plausible noise, in the era of everybody having ideas, of everybody having their opinion, of everybody being able to produce so much stuff that it really is going to be about how are we clear on what we're not going to do? What are the zombie projects? What's that one-off prototype? What's that thing where it's like, look, like that is not something we're going to do and we need to kill it? Because the roadmap is going to just encourage everybody to come rushing in. If we don't have those guardrails in that process, the plausible noise is going to become deafening. But it is that how do we slow down that front of the funnel to think about the post-mortem, to think about the guardrails, to think about the system, and then speed up the back to get real efficiency, to get a real lift out of what that is, to be able to train the models, to be able to do those sort of things so that we're getting work that actually matters. I see so many people that are just kind of using the off-the-shelf version or something, and their brand voice isn't their brand voice anymore. It's the internet. That their brand look isn't their brand anymore. It like again, you can look at you and see it a mile away. Just scroll through LinkedIn. It is so obvious what the chat GPT slop is that it's in there, and everybody's like, yeah, but I made it quickly. That's great. But as near as I can tell, you don't have an opinion I care about anymore. And I think that's leading to what is going to probably be one of the biggest seismic shifts on a lot of teams, is that historically organizations have been a pyramid. That you had a the small percentage at the top that did the thinking. You had the middle layer, which was bigger, that were sort of the people that were managing and sort of making sure that the thinkers, what they wanted to do, got done. And then you had a lot of people at the base that were doing the doing. They were doing the designing, the coding, the writing, the editing, the photography, whatever that was, right? Like, and that construct works for more than just design, but it's like great. There's a few people in charge of the strategy, there's a middle layer that's managing, and a lot of people that are doing. This is where, again, design has gotten so problematic because we got caught in the bottom layer of that pyramid, and we just got caught into the doing. And again, this is where my fear comes in that if we don't wake up, our industry is about to get crushed. And a lot of people who I know and love are about to get crushed because that pyramid is flipping over. Where what is going to become the priority is going to be the thinking. And that there's going to be a layer of management, but the doing is really going to get reduced. That the copywriter needs to become the content strategist, that they need to work with the AI model. They need to be able to train it. They need to be the one that, you know, look, AI will get you 80% of the way there. And then we need to be the ones that pick up that work, that go through it, that make sure that it's right, that validate the sources, that build the models, that train it on what to do, that that's what we're doing. So it's more from a strategy and a thinking standpoint, knowing that the execution, which has always been a commodity, that is getting devalued at a shocking rate. And then if we aren't able to shift to be able to do that, to get up to the top of the pyramid, then a lot of roles are going to get eliminated. They already are. I think there's a lot of AI washing out there right now for bad business practices that are getting labeled as AI, but that pyramid is flipping over. And if you're in the place of just being in the doer, if you're just the designer, the copywriter, the whatever that role is, that is just about the doing, you need to start moving towards the strategy piece of this. And again, I think that this is what it's going to be that the companies that not just survive, but the companies that really excel, they're not going to have fewer people. I think they're just going to have fewer layers, right? Like think about what you will, but I think this is why when you hear somebody like Jack Dorsey talk about, oh, he wants to have 600 people all reporting to him. I don't think that that's going to necessarily what that's going to turn out to be, but it's this concept, right? It's this really collapsing of the layers. And it's going to create, and I think again, this is something somebody hasn't really thought about. As we look in five years or more, right? Like, where are the future leaders going to come from when a lot of that apprenticeship work, when a lot of the introductory work, when a lot of the doing work becomes automated, and where you're being asked to jump in, not and learn up, like where you'd learn the tools, and then you'd start to get into the ideas, and then you'd start to scale up from there. You're going to need to jump in at a much higher level. You need to jump in at a place that's much more strategic. It's going to be much less executional, right? Like that traditional path into the industry is not going to look anything like what it does now. And these are the sort of things that keep me up at night. These are the sort of things that I'm wrestling with for my future personally, for the company, for because that's the thing, right? Like this is a leadership problem. That's not a tool problem. This is a culture problem. This isn't an LLM problem, right? Like, this is a how are we going to construct organizations that are going to be successful to be able to work in these sort of worlds? And right now we're having just the executional piece of this conversation. And again, that's not going to be where this conversation is going to end up. And that's where I get very worried because a lot of the leadership, this isn't what they're thinking about. They're treating AI as this sort of like CapEx problem, not an RD problem. They're seeing it as just a tool problem, not a culture problem. And they're about to be in for a really rude awakening. But that's the other shift, right? We need to start hiring and training for that level of critique and strategy and thinking, not production. We need to make our standards around how do we use AI, what is acceptable as an output, what is the standard we have. We need to make that explicit so that it is very clear to people what is good thinking versus what appears to be good. And then once you scratch the veneer, that it's something that doesn't work. We need to have a really clear process that says, look, we want people to come in, we want them to collaborate, but we need to be clear on what does that look like. That there's a time and a place for that, that constantly throwing every product and every artifact and everything up into the air so that everybody else feels like they have the right to go in and redo it or to reshape the brand or whatever it is, right? We've got to protect those moments and protect those standards. Because if not, and again, that's gonna be the thing. It's not gonna be one big thing. It's gonna be your sales team or your marketing team that again starts putting out all this AI slop and then nobody takes your brand seriously. It's gonna be, again, this plausible noise that's gonna paralyze your internal pipeline and all the work that you're doing because you all have to constantly start stopping dealing with this problem, putting it back in its place, you know, being able to answer somebody on something, and it's just this constant low-level hum, and then you get to the end of the year or the end of the quarter and go, why didn't we do anything? Well, because we spent the whole time having to defend and keep everybody focused and on track, and to stop dealing with all this other work that's getting done. But that's sort of where, again, like I said, this is just a really quick shock and all exposure to these problems that I'm seeing because I want people to start talking about it. I want you to start thinking about it. I'm probably gonna dig into these topics more in shows coming up. But here's the thing that I think everybody needs to wrap their head around, right? If this was six months ago, 12 months ago, 18 months ago, this is a conversation around do we think AI is gonna be a thing? That conversation is over. It absolutely is. Now, again, I'm working on content and doing things like that. It for me, I think a lot of people don't aren't realistic in that it is not a magic bullet. It is not the solution to everything. Like, again, I'm going in and using claw design and other things like that. I again, I think that the Adobe and Figma stock tankings were premature because if you go in and use it, it makes for a great demo, makes for a great YouTube video. I'm not able to get it to a place where it is taking my job or displacing a designer yet. Do I think it'll get there? Probably. Do I think there's going to be a need for us to be able to still be a part of this and help guide it? Absolutely. But that's the thing, is that this isn't a theoretical conversation anymore. And I think for a lot of us, we want to bury our head in the sand and we know that we're behind and we know whatever is going on is something we need to get up on and be a part of and have these conversations. We don't know where to start. But this is the thought I go back to every single day. The world is changing fast. It feels like everything is racing forward every single day. But I remind myself that while as fast as it feels and as much change as it feels like it is going on, the world is never going to be as slow again as what it is today. Things are not slowing down, right? This is a bell that's not going to get unrung. That we need to be a part of these conversations because there's too many decisions that are being made by leadership that's prioritizing, oh, I can get rid of a bunch of people and save a bunch of money in the next quarter, and then I'm gonna completely destroy my company in two years. But you know, that'll be somebody else's problem. We have to be a part of this conversation. You cannot leave it just to other people. And again, this is something I've done episodes on this in the past, but I want to revisit it. Is that it is this concept that the teams are gonna win, the people that are gonna win, the careers that are gonna be successful are going to embrace the concept that agile is the new smart. Not agile in the methodology, but that change is the constant. And the way that you are engineering your skill set, the way that you are building your teams, the way that your company is going about these problems and understanding how quickly things are changing, the ones that are building to react to that are the ones that are gonna win. The ones that are gonna keep doing things because that's the way it's always been. That's the way we've always hired people, that's the way we've always trained, this is the way we've always done, are either going to get ripped apart from the inside out by a whole lot of noise that they don't know how to deal with, or they're gonna see large parts of their career or their industry displaced because they aren't aware of what the tools can do, they aren't thinking in the right way, and that they're gonna get replaced by smaller, faster teams that are gonna be able to come in and do it. And that's what I'm saying. These are the conversations we're too drunk on like what LLM should I be doing, or what model should I be doing, or who's gonna get me the best imagery, right? Like at the end of the day, look, I get it. The tools are important. But for the bigger conversation, bigger impact about design, creativity, and everything else, who gives a shit? Right? Who cares what the model is? That at the end of the day, it is still about what it is we create, what is it that we communicate, how do we set ourselves up for successful? To be successful, how do great ideas still get out and see the light of day and have an impact for our clients, for our business, and for ourselves, right? That is what matters. And that so often we get so execution drunk and get so caught up in the tooling that we forget what really matters. And that's why I'm saying right now, that what is going to define this next era, what is gonna define who is successful and who is not, is not going to be a tooling problem.

unknown 20:36

Right?

Outro & Call to Action

SPEAKER_00 20:37

Like, yes, at some point the models you use doesn't matter. Yes. Of course it does. I'm not saying it doesn't matter. But what's going to define what is successful and what is not is not going to be those tools. It's going to be the way the companies and teams and careers are constructed. What is it that they are thinking about? That's what's going to make the difference. And that is a conversation I'm seeing no one having. That's a conversation I'm having with so many teams whenever I come in and give these talks, and you watch the color drain out of their face because you can tell nobody's beginning to think about this stuff. And that plausible noise is real for them and they are suffering through it. So these are the conversations we need to be having. This is the stuff we need to start thinking about. This is what, at least for the next couple episodes, I'm going to be focusing on is this. Because this is what's going to make or break us. This is what's going to matter. Right? Like, look, you want to go figure out what the new latest release of whatever LLM is. There's a million people on YouTube that'll do it with a bunch of candidly bullshit videos about how they built a brand in 37 seconds and they didn't. They built a logo on a bunch of color swatches, not a brand. The fact that more people don't know that is going to piss me off to the day I die. But that's the thing, right? These are the conversations we have start to we have got to start getting out in front of. Because if we don't, we're going to reap the whirlwind on it and nobody's going to want this outcome. So I'm going to climb down off my soapbox. I've been up here for about 20 minutes. But this is what look, this is this is what brought me back out and to do the show again. We need to start having these conversations and thinking about this stuff. So, look, if you got questions, those sort of things, as always, reach out. You know where to find me. Just put my name in anywhere, not hard to find. But look, let me know what your thoughts are. Are there other problems that you're seeing that I've got a blind spot to? Are there other things that are going on in much bigger companies that, again, you know, they're dragging and struggling with to be able to do that? So look, I hope it helps. I hope this starts to really, I hope it's a bit of a wake-up call. I'm not gonna be honest. I hope it maybe keeps you up at night because you need to rethink some things. But I hope you start rethinking it now, right? When there still is the chance to be the leader, to be the one that's out in front of this is again as opposed to being the one who is having to react and having it imposed upon you. That's always been my hope in doing this show, and it'll continue to be that. So look, more to come on this. This is just the start, as even I'm working through this problem, and where I'll share it all in real time as I go. So hopefully it helps. Follow along, send it to a friend, shout it from the rooftop. Give me a call if you want me to help work with you or your team on what this is and figuring it out. I am here for any and all of it. So go have a good think. Go go sigh and get to work. And as always, stay crazy.