Has AI made ideation so cheap that execution is becoming the scarce skill?
For most of history, getting from a blank page to a decent idea took work.
Now you can open ChatGPT or Claude and generate 20 strategies, 50 content ideas, a new product concept, a sales campaign, an operating plan, a hiring strategy, and six ways to improve all of them before breakfast.
That feels like productivity.
Sometimes it is.
But it can also become productive looking procrastination.
You start with one idea. AI gives you five extensions. Then you ask what you’re missing. Now you have twelve. Then you ask it to prioritize them, turn them into projects, create a roadmap, and find opportunities around each one.
Suddenly, you’ve spent two hours building an incredibly sophisticated list of things you haven’t actually done.
There’s a bigger distinction underneath all of this.
AI has dramatically increased our capacity to think. It has not increased the number of hours in the day.
Before AI, the problem was often:
“I need a good idea.”
Now it might be:
“Which one of these 37 good ideas am I actually going to finish?”
That applies to founders, executives, marketers, developers, recruiters, almost everybody.
I’m in this myself.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve built HUMAN, a fully functioning back office financial operations system, live CFO dashboards and reporting, a client intelligence engine, a relationship intelligence engine, new recruiting ideas, new service areas, content systems, automation, and more.
AI makes it possible to see connections between all of these things incredibly quickly.
That is powerful.
But it also creates a legitimate management question.
Are we building businesses faster, or are we just building bigger backlogs?
AI Is Making Us Faster
The interesting part is that the research says AI really is improving productivity.
In controlled studies, people using AI have completed certain kinds of work faster and, in many cases, produced better results. Customer support workers using AI resolved about 15% more issues per hour, and a major knowledge worker study found people completed appropriate tasks faster and at higher quality.
So the argument here is not that AI is making us less productive.
It is that task productivity and actual execution may not be the same thing.
A 2025 field experiment involving more than 7,000 knowledge workers across 66 companies found that people using generative AI spent about two fewer hours per week on email and worked less outside normal hours.
That is meaningful.
But the researchers found very little change in the overall quantity or composition of the work being done.
Another recent review found that generative AI was particularly useful for gathering and developing information, but the results became more mixed when AI moved into the actual choice and decision making stage.
That starts getting closer to what I think we’re experiencing.
AI is great at giving us possibilities.
Business still requires us to choose.
Recruiting Makes This Really Easy to See
Imagine a recruiter sitting down Monday morning.
- AI can identify 400 candidates.
- Write 30 outreach variations.
- Analyze every company hiring Python engineers.
- Surface past clients.
- Build a BD list.
- Draft follow-ups.
- Email 500 people.
- Research every hiring manager.
Fantastic.
Who did you actually call?
The same thing happens in business development.
You can generate 600 prospects.
But did you identify the 15 people who were truly worth pursuing?
- Did you call them?
- Did you follow up?
- Did you stay with them through seven, ten, maybe twelve touches instead of moving on to another newly generated list?
Hiring works the same way.
AI can write the job description, benchmark compensation, build an interview plan, develop technical questions, research candidates, and summarize every interview.
- You still have to interview people.
- You still have to decide.
- You still have to make the hire.
Ideas Are Cheap. Decisions Are Becoming More Valuable.
AI may have removed one of the oldest constraints in business, the shortage of ideas, but it may be exposing another constraint we didn’t talk about nearly enough.
Our ability to choose, commit, and follow through.
We are becoming extraordinarily capable of generating options.
The advantage may increasingly belong to the people who know when to stop generating them.
Ideate. Choose. Act. Measure. Finish.
Not:
Ideate. Improve the idea. Generate alternatives. Research the alternatives. Build a framework. Ask AI what you forgot. Build another framework.
There will always be another prompt to write.
Maybe the next great productivity skill isn’t prompting.
Maybe it’s knowing when to close ChatGPT and make the call.
FAQs
How is AI changing recruiting and hiring?
AI can help companies identify candidates, research talent markets, create job descriptions, summarize interviews and improve recruiting workflows. The harder part is still execution, knowing which candidates to pursue, communicating with them, interviewing efficiently and making a hiring decision.
Can AI replace recruiters?
AI can automate parts of recruiting, but hiring still depends heavily on judgment, relationships, communication and follow through. At Averity, we use technology to improve the recruiting process while keeping people at the center of hiring decisions.
How can a recruiting firm help companies hire faster in the age of AI?
A recruiting partner can help turn a large talent market into a smaller group of qualified people worth interviewing. Averity helps companies hire full time and contract talent across AI, machine learning, cybersecurity, software engineering, product, hardware and other technical disciplines.
What is the biggest hiring advantage companies can have as AI creates more options?
Speed and clarity. Companies that know what they need, identify the right candidates quickly, communicate consistently and make decisions tend to have a better chance of securing strong talent before the process stalls. Averity’s recruiting process is built around helping companies move from search to decision efficiently.
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