There was a familiar theme running through almost every conversation about AI recently: context.
Not the sort that appears in a strategy deck or gets added to a project update after the event. Real context. The stuff that sits in people’s heads. Why something matters. What happened last time. Which stakeholder will object. Why the obvious answer is probably the wrong one.
Give an AI tool a task with little context and it can be impressively unhelpful. It will confidently head off in the wrong direction, producing something polished, plausible and entirely detached from reality. A bit like that colleague who attended half the meeting and volunteered to write the summary.
Give it context, however, and the results can be remarkable.
The lesson is not that AI needs better prompts. It is that AI needs people who stay close enough to provide judgment, challenge assumptions and fill in the gaps. The technology is becoming increasingly capable. The role of the human is becoming increasingly important.
For years, work was often about finding information. Increasingly, the challenge is providing the right context to make information useful.
The tools keep getting better.
The judgment is still ours.
And for the foreseeable future, that remains a reassuringly human competitive advantage.
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