Blog - Tom Talks

Building Block: AI Should Give Us Time Back—Not More Work

One of the great promises of AI is productivity.

Emails written faster. Meetings summarized automatically. Research completed in minutes. Reports created in seconds.

So here’s a question:

What are we doing with all the time we’re saving?

There’s a danger that AI simply allows us to cram more activity into an already crowded day.

Answer more emails.

Attend more meetings.

Produce more reports.

Complete more tasks.

That’s not necessarily productivity. It’s just being busy at a higher speed.

The real opportunity with AI is to eliminate or reduce lower-value work so people can spend more time on things that matter.

For leaders, that might mean thinking about strategy, developing employees, talking with customers, or simply having uninterrupted time to think.

For technical professionals, it might mean spending less time writing routine code and more time understanding requirements, designing solutions, and solving difficult business problems.

There’s also a personal side to this.

If technology helps you finish the day’s work earlier, you don’t necessarily need to fill the newly available hour with another hour of work.

Go exercise.

Have dinner with your family.

Read a book.

Or do absolutely nothing productive. There’s a novel idea.

Technology should help us become more effective—not simply more occupied.

Building Block: Doing Less Can Produce More

In The 100: Building Blocks for Business Leadership, I wrote about what I called the “activity traps” that consume time and energy while accomplishing surprisingly little.

I also described Stephen Covey’s familiar metaphor of putting the “big rocks” into the bucket first. For me, those big rocks included important meetings, daily huddles, family time, and exercise. Everything else—the sand—filled the space around them.

My takeaway then was straightforward:

“Learn to smile and explain that the secret is working smarter, not longer.”

AI gives us perhaps the greatest opportunity we’ve had in decades to put that principle into practice.

The goal shouldn’t be to see how much more work AI allows us to squeeze into a day.

The goal should be to accomplish what matters—and get some of our day back.

Building Block: AI Can Speed Up Hiring. Don’t Let It Rush the Decision

AI is making hiring faster.

It can screen resumes, summarize interviews, identify skills, generate interview questions, and compare candidates in seconds.

That’s useful.

But there’s an important distinction between speeding up the hiring process and speeding up the hiring decision.

I’ve made enough hiring decisions over the years to know the difference.

When you’re short-handed, an open position feels like a problem that needs to be solved immediately. A candidate checks most of the boxes, everyone is busy, and it’s tempting to say, “Good enough.”

That’s usually when trouble starts.

AI can help us gather and organize more information about candidates. It can’t determine whether someone will take ownership when things go wrong, work well with your team, earn a client’s trust, or live your company’s values when nobody is watching.

Those things still require human judgment.

Use AI to eliminate administrative work. Use it to prepare better questions. Use it to make your hiring process more thorough and efficient.

Then slow down for the part that matters most: deciding who joins your team.

Getting the right person a week later is almost always better than getting the wrong person tomorrow.

Building Block: Hiring Slowly Is Still Good Business

In The 100: Building Blocks for Business Leadership, I wrote about a lesson I’d learned the hard way:

“Avoid hasty hires.”

I noted that when we’ve justified hiring someone because of an especially heavy workload, that person might provide short-term relief but fail to work out over the long term. The lesson was simple: take the time to thoroughly evaluate someone before inviting them onto your team.

A decade later, technology has dramatically changed hiring.

The principle hasn’t.

Let AI make the process faster.

Don’t let it make you impatient.

Building Block: Great Leaders Solve Problems Early

AI is incredibly good at solving problems.

Unfortunately…

It will happily solve the wrong one.

Businesses often jump straight into implementation before asking whether they’re addressing the real issue.

The result?

Elegant solutions.

Poor outcomes.

The best leaders spend more time defining the problem than discussing the solution.

Once everyone agrees on the problem, execution becomes dramatically easier.

Speed is valuable.

Direction is essential.

Building Block: Meetings Should Move the Business Forward

Every meeting should answer one question:

“What changed because we met?”

Too many meetings are simply status updates.

AI can generate those automatically.

Great meetings make decisions.

Remove obstacles.

Align priorities.

Clarify ownership.

The purpose of a meeting has never been communication.

It’s coordinated action.

As AI takes over information sharing, meetings become even more valuable—but only if they move the business forward.

Building Block: Trust Begins With Humility

One characteristic separates high-performing leadership teams from average ones.

Humility.

Leaders who admit mistakes create organizations where employees aren’t afraid to surface problems early.

Leaders who pretend to have all the answers create silence.

Ironically, AI makes humility even more valuable.

Sometimes AI will be right.

Sometimes it will be spectacularly wrong.

The best leaders won’t defend either position.

They’ll simply follow the evidence.

Being right matters far less than finding the right answer.