“Sorry. Can you email me these slides? I can’t read them on the screen.”

In our Boardroom. With a big screen. I was 4m away. And the text was so small, the content so dense, that my new glasses were just not good enough.

When they came through in my email, I could barely read the slides on my laptop.

AI is making beautiful-looking presentations. That are impossible to engage with. That obscure any sense of message or priority or headline, with relentless total completeness of coverage. In. Every. Slide.

It’s exhausting.

And the emails.

In one exchange I’ve seen this week one person sent an email that looked pretty AI-assisted. It was long, detailed, asked for comments, explanations, processes and flowcharts. Essentially it was requesting a complete institutional SWOT, strategy, governance framework and KPIs… days or weeks of work… and just slightly off-axis from the framework already being worked to… in an email that had probably taken a not much more than moment to draft.

The recipient fed the email into copilot and generated a slide deck reminiscent of the one in the image for this post. Slide after slide of condensed, rich, detailed response.

And I couldn’t find the most important points in any of it.

We sometimes joke in universities about the lecturer who uses AI to draft the assignment. The student who uses AI to complete the assignment. The lecturer who uses AI to mark the assignment and give feedback…

And the business of education is reduced to two AIs talking to each other.

It’s not funny of course.

But it’s happening well beyond education now.

Managers using AI to draft requests of their people. Teams using AI to draft a response. Managers reviewing and critiquing those responses with AI.

We’re drowning in AI work product.

And no-one is really asking the questions that really matter. Like:

What’s the MOST important factor here?

What’s the ONE thing we should do that will really move us in the right direction?

How do we EXECUTE that one thing so powerfully we can’t fail?