A founder I know spent last Tuesday afternoon in an AI tool, nudging a logo two pixels left, then two pixels right, for the better part of three hours. It came out great. That same afternoon, a hiring decision he had been circling for a month sat where it was, and the person he wanted took another company's offer. When we spoke he told me all about the logo. He did not mention the candidate until I asked.
Most of the CEOs I know who leaned into AI this year are making less money than before, not more. I find that funny, in the way a thing is funny right up until it stops being funny.
It is not the tools. The tools are absurdly good.
I used Fable this week, and anyone who tells you the current models are bad is either not using them or selling you something else. That part of the hype is true. You can sit down at nine and have by lunch what used to take a studio two weeks.
Here is what nobody printed on the box. The tools are so good at the small work that they pull you straight down into it. A founder can now design the logo, write the email sequence, cut the launch video, and build the landing page, all before the first meeting of the day. So they do. It feels like progress, because every one of those jobs used to cost real money and now it costs a subscription.
But a CEO's hour is not worth €70. The job they are there to do, decide which market to chase, which bet to place, who to hire, whether the product is even the right product, is worth something closer to €3,000 an hour, because nobody else in the company can do it and getting it wrong sinks everything downstream. Every afternoon spent nudging a font is an afternoon that call did not get made. The tool has no idea. It cannot see your calendar or your cap table. It will help you pour your most expensive hours into the cheapest work you own, cheerfully, all day, because that is exactly what you asked it for.
Every hour on €70 work is an hour of €3,000 work that did not happen.
AI did not make the small work more valuable. It made it cheaper, which is a different thing, and cheap work is a trap for the person whose time is dear. The cost of doing it yourself fell to almost nothing, so the reason not to fell with it. You used to hand the logo to a designer because your own time was too expensive to spend there. Your time is still that expensive. The designer just got quietly swapped for you, at forty times the rate.
So here is the question I would ask. Not what can I now do myself. What can I now stop touching. Point the tools at the work below your pay grade, so your hours land on the work above it. Let AI clear the €70 jobs off your desk. Do not let it hand you a hundred new ones and call it leverage.
The founder with the logo is not a fool. He used the best software ever made to turn himself into his own junior designer, and he cannot see it yet. That is the trap, and it is a quiet one. Do less. Spend the hours you claw back on the one or two calls nobody else in the building can make. The rest is expensive fun.
