AI Moved the Bottleneck

I’ve been thinking about something that’s easy to miss in all the excitement around AI productivity.

What happens to all that faster work after AI helps us produce it?

We can research faster. Analyze more information. Draft faster. Generate more options. Prepare recommendations in a fraction of the time.

Then someone still has to decide what to do.

And in a lot of organizations, that part hasn’t changed.

The same manager needs to approve it. The same committee meets every two weeks. The same issue gets escalated because nobody is quite sure who has authority to make the call.

The bottleneck didn’t disappear.

It moved.

That’s potentially a Decision Debt problem.

If AI helps a team generate four times as many recommendations but the organization can’t make decisions any faster, we’ve increased the amount of work arriving at the bottleneck without increasing our ability to handle it.

So I think leaders need to look beyond AI productivity.

If analysis time dropped by 70 percent, great. How long did the recommendation wait for a decision afterward?

If teams are producing more, are we also giving them the authority to decide more?

Are we clear about what actually needs to be escalated?

And are all those approvals and governance meetings still necessary?

There are absolutely decisions where human judgment should remain central. AI shouldn’t change that.

But that doesn’t mean every process surrounding those decisions needs to stay the same.

That’s the distinction I think matters.

We don’t need to remove the human from the loop. We need to design a better loop.

Use AI to do what it does well. Let it accelerate preparation, analysis, information gathering, and the development of alternatives.

Then make it clear where human judgment belongs and give those decisions a way to move.

Because making the work faster only helps if the organization can keep up with it.

Otherwise, we’ve just moved the bottleneck.

Matt

Be a Decisive Leader
Better Decisions. Less Decision Debt.