AI Won't Take Your Seat... But It Might Reveal You Were Sitting in the Wrong One
Welcome, dear reader, to the boardroom... the place where the scent of premium coffee mingles with the chill of the air conditioning, and those knowing glances are exchanged between the gentlemen executives as they speak the language of "KPIs" and "Forecasts"..
A few years ago... things were simple and very comfortable. You'd walk in looking sharp, carrying a complex, color-coded Excel file with some Charts and a Forecast for the year ahead.. The board would look at you with respect, and you'd be "the guy with the numbers" -- the door everyone knocked on to find out what tomorrow was hiding..!!
Today?
Everything has changed.. Any manager five years your junior can upload the sales file to any AI tool and simply say: "Analyze the Sales Trend, segment the customers, compare the regions, surface the Anomalies, and build Forecast scenarios".. and all of that in a matter of minutes..!!
And they might even walk out of the meeting with a Presentation a thousand times better than yours, and shinier too.. 😂
So does that mean AI is coming to replace the commercial director..?!
Honestly, the question itself is wrong.. and shallow to a degree of stupidity sufficient to convince you the Earth is flat, or that Barcelona fans support Real Madrid..!!
Because the real question, the one that genuinely matters to me, is: when AI enters the boardroom... what value is left in the manager himself?
Because a large portion of the work we once considered "years of experience, sweat, and effort" is now being done in seconds..
And the research is not quiet about this; take a very interesting field experiment conducted by researchers from Harvard in collaboration with BCG on 758 consultants -- they found that using GPT-4 on tasks within its capabilities made them complete their work more than 25% faster, with performance quality improving by more than 40%..
But the study introduced a somewhat alarming concept called the Jagged Technological Frontier.. meaning AI does not move in a straight line; you find it brilliant in one area, and naively stupid in another area that looks almost identical..
And more dangerously, the same study found that on a complex task outside its capabilities, AI users were 19 percentage points less likely to reach the correct solution -- meaning the very same tool that can massively boost your performance on one task can make you more confident in a wrong answer on another..
And that, for me, is the starting point..
Is AI powerful? The answer is... yes..
But that does not mean at all that it "understands the business" better than you do or that it has become a substitute for you..
Let us walk through this together..
Scene one: the Forecast looks excellent.. but the market is not buying it..!!
Picture this with me: an FMCG company sitting down to revise next quarter's Forecast. We feed in the Historical Sales, calculate the Seasonality, plug in the Promotions and SKU Performance, and ask the AI to do its job and build the Forecast..
The result? A Model that is something else. The numbers make sense, the charts are a pleasure to look at, and the presentation carries itself with such confidence you start feeling like the company is headed straight to the clouds..
But there is one tiny little piece of information, nowhere to be found in any Data in the world: that one of the key distributors is sitting on two months' worth of Stock, because of a Loading that happened in the last week of the previous Quarter so the sales guys could close their Target and collect their bonus!
So what did the AI actually do here? It analyzed the data you handed it brilliantly. But was the sales it saw real Sell-in that reflects genuine demand from the market? Or did we just move inventory from the company's warehouse into the distributor's dark warehouse and call it "Growth"?
This is not an AI problem at all.. This is a Business Understanding problem.
Because if the manager sitting there does not understand the difference between a product's movement inside the Channel and its actual movement into the hands of the end consumer.. AI is not going to solve that for them. On the contrary, it will make their mistake more convincing and more presentable..
In other words, it will just make a bad situation worse, but with style..!!
Now let's move to the second scene:
Is the distributor weak, or are we the ones managing them wrong?
A scenario that keeps repeating itself everywhere in the FMCG world.
The sales report says a Distributor is Underperforming, we put their numbers in front of the AI, and out comes a ready-made prescription: weak Coverage, low Productivity per Rep, declining Average Drop Size, and a brilliant Action Plan to go with it.
But if you go down yourself and walk the street, you will discover something remarkable: the problem was never with the distributor in the first place. Starting from the SKU Mix that is wrong for that specific area, to the Price Architecture that is creating a fight between wholesale and retail, to the product sitting on the bottom shelf where no customer can see it, to the competitor coming in with a Route-to-Market that is far smarter than yours..!!
AI analyzes what you can measure, and nothing more.. But the right manager is the one who knows to ask: "What exactly are we not measuring in the first place?"
Now let's go to the third scene:
The new product is a massive success.. in the Presentation.
We are launching a new food product, we ask AI for a Market Analysis, Consumer Personas, Positioning, Pricing, and a GTM Plan, and it hands you back a plan you could teach in a university..
We take the product to market, we brief the distributors, the reps go out with their Targets, the product floods thousands of outlets, and the Distribution lights up green, so we celebrate two months later? The consumer is not pulling a single thing off the shelf..!!
Inventory is piling up, the expiry date is closing in, the distributor is panicking and demanding discounts, and the manufacturer throws it back in our faces like a live grenade..
Why? Because Distribution was never Demand. Having product on the shelf does not mean people want to buy it. And this is where the real danger shows up: AI can help you answer the wrong question with tremendous elegance.
And this is where psychology walks into the boardroom..
Given my background and my study of mental health, I always look at this from a purely human perspective. Because I am not afraid of AI's stupidity. I am terrified of the human being who uses it..
The manager does not come to the tool with a blank mind. He comes with his gut, his history, his fears, his preconceived opinions, his interests, and his own personal blind spots. So if I already believe deep down that "this sales team is a failure," I will write the Prompt in a way that gets the AI to produce hard evidence proving the sales team is a failure.
This is what we scientifically call Confirmation Bias. At that point AI stops being an honest investigator and becomes a creative lawyer who justifies your mistakes for you.
There is an even more dangerous trap called Automation Bias: you start believing anything that appears on the screen simply because it is written in a clean font and calm colors. A recent study by Carnegie Mellon and Microsoft Research covering 319 knowledge workers found that the more people trusted GenAI, the less critical thinking and mental effort they applied. The answer looks polished and ready, so the brain relaxes and switches off.
Which brings us to a hard truth: the Prompt was never the Strategy. You can type "Build me a Go-to-Market Strategy" and receive 20 perfect pages. But did you identify the right Beachhead Market? Is the ICP built on real data or on wishful thinking? Does the distributor actually have the capacity to execute?
So the bottom line, dear reader, is that AI is not a substitute for experience, and yet calling it "just another ordinary tool" is also an incomplete and overly comforting thing to say.
AI is a Multiplier. If you have genuine Business Understanding, clean Data, and a mind capable of doubt, criticism, and analysis, it will multiply your speed and quality a thousandfold..
But if you have wrong Assumptions, shallow understanding, and a lazy mind, it will help you produce the same disaster, only faster, slicker, and in a PowerPoint that looks absolutely stunning..!!
That is why my question is not: will the robot take your seat? The real and harder question is: now that all the tedious work of analysis, research, and Presentation wraps up in seconds, what is the genuine value that you personally add to the decision?
If you have an answer, sleep easy, because this AI is the nicest colleague you could ever share an office with..
But if you cannot find an answer, the shock is not that AI is coming to take your seat. Maybe it simply arrived to reveal that you have been sitting in the wrong seat all along, and nobody ever noticed..!!