February 28, 2026 | Read online
I quit fantasy football a while back.
Not because I wasn’t good at it, but because the platforms made it too easy for me and I got lazy.
This is one of my biggest concerns with AI.
Let me explain.
I really enjoyed playing fantasy football initially. I researched the players, built my team strategically, monitored the waver wire and yes, talked plenty of trash.
But then I got busy with work, family, travel, etc.
One week, I didn’t have time to set my roster so I used the auto-lineup feature. I ended up winning that week (by a lot).
So guess what happened next week. I got busy again and used the auto-lineup again. And guess what? I won again.
One year, I won the league championship and didn’t set my own line-up once.
Awesome right? Wrong.
The auto-line up made it too easy for me to stop paying attention, so I stopped learning and eventually stopped caring.
I had lost all my knowledge about the players and my interest in the fantasy league. I eventually couldn’t even have a respectable conversation with my friends about which players were doing well and why. That “Championship” I won felt hollow and meaningless. All the joy had been sucked out of the process for me.
I’m worried AI is going to do the same to many of us.
Have you seen the movie WALL-E?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nts0x9Lahm0
That’s where we’re heading if we’re not careful.
I see too many reps outsourcing their thinking and learning to AI, without understanding the “why” behind the output they’re looking for.
For instance, they’ll ask AI to research an account to find a trigger event like M&A and then write a personalized email to a client for them that connects it to their value proposition.
AI will do that better and faster than the rep ever could. This is a win for “productivity” and “efficiency,” but it’s a huge loss in learning and development.
Has that rep ever been through a M&A? Do they know what happens at the different stages of a Merger, specifically for the role (ex. CRO) they’re reaching out to try to get a meeting with?
What if the prospect responds and gets on a call with a rep to discuss what was highlighted in the perfectly written AI email and realizes the rep has no insights or understanding of what they’re going through?
Other examples are these AI tools that help you prep for meetings. All you need to do is input the company website and LinkedIn profile of the person you’re meeting with, and it produces this beautiful 3-4 page analysis with insights on their business, how you can help them, questions to ask, potential objections, and even a suggested agenda for the call.
That’s fantastic if the rep then reads through the information to understand it and digs deeper into anything they don’t or want to learn more about before the call.
The problem is most people are lazy and when they get the 3-4 page summary, they skim through it and check the box, thinking they’ve prepped for the meeting without really understanding any of the information or how to use it.
Add your cIf you want to check out the Custom Meeting Prep GPT I created that walks you through the learning process as you prep for a meeting and THEN produces a 2 page summary just reply to this email and I’ll send it to you.
You can also join me this coming Thursday for a training on how to leverage AI to research accounts, prep for meetings, develop hypotheses and much more. If you show up live, you’ll get free access to my new JB Salesbot that includes all my training content.
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I even got lazy using my favorite platform (and sponsor) Otter. It made it so easy for me to record and summarize calls that I stopped taking notes and putting together my own Summary emails.
I still use it on every call, but I’ve gone back to taking notes on a notepad and then consolidating them into my own summary email using Otter for reference to make sure I didn’t forget anything.
(Their new desktop app makes it even easier to use. Check it out)
Ultimately my main concern is that we’ve gone from a search engine to an answer engine and that’s a very dangerous thing.
We can all argue that Google gave us whatever information it felt like, but there was at least the perception of choice. We had to read an article or two to come up with an answer to whatever question we had or information we were looking for.
Now, with AI, it just gives us the answer and that answer fundamentally cannot be 100% accurate. I mean, 30% of the data that AI gets its information from is Reddit…. Have you been on Reddit recently? Yeah…
That’s why curiosity is THE superpower in the age of AI.
For those of us who are curious, AI is the best co-pilot/coach/strategist/learning tool we’ve ever had access to when used right.
For those of us who are lazy and just looking for AI to give us the answer, then it’s not a superpower, it’s a replacement.
If all we’re going to do is copy/paste or autogenerate a response using AI, then what’s the value of the human in that equation? I would argue zero.
If you’re curious, and you use AI to learn along the way, the value of the human can be amplified better and faster than ever before.
Get curious!
#MakeitHappen
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