At OpenAI’s recent developer conference, CEO Sam Altman said he hoped AI would bring about a kind of renaissance. I also think AI should give people more freedom to learn, create, and put their ideas into practice, rather than turn them into cogs spinning faster in a giant machine. But in recent conversations, I’ve noticed that while the tools have improved, the way we judge people’s work hasn’t necessarily changed.
Not long ago, I met with several Fortune 500 CEOs to talk about how their companies were adopting AI. One told me he used to look at who was using the most tokens and assume that person was his best employee. He later realized that wasn’t quite the right way to judge performance.
When companies don’t yet know how to assess AI’s impact, it’s easy to treat token usage as a measure of performance. But usage alone doesn’t tell us whether any truly important problems have been solved. It may simply mean a lot of resources were used without results to match.
I often hear founders proudly say, “Look how quickly I built this product.” When they do, I remind them to be clear about how much comes from their own innovation and how much they owe to the AI model.
Companies judging employees by token usage and founders using speed to prove themselves may seem like unrelated issues. But both focus on what’s easiest to count and show, and assume they’ve answered a harder question.
That question is what more important work we can do with the time AI saves us. This is what excites me most about AI. Software has helped us work more efficiently. My hope is that AI will handle more of the repetitive work, giving us time to work on difficult problems we’ve kept putting off.
A small team may have a project it wants to pursue but never enough people to take it on. If AI can handle most of the tedious work so the team can finally carry out its plans, that’s when speed means something. AI makes it easier to put ideas into practice. It gives us a chance to rethink how we spend our time and do things we couldn’t do before. That’s the renaissance I hope AI will bring.
