The Most Valuable Thing in Your Company Might Be the Person Who Says "I'm Not Sure About This"
HBR's Christian Catalini argues that as AI makes answers cheap, the scarce skill becomes knowing when the AI is wrong.
Prompted by “AI Is Making Verification the Bottleneck for Companies”, HBR (Christian Catalini).
Christian Catalini's point cuts against the current AI pitch: as generating content and answers gets cheap, the thing that actually separates companies isn't who adopts AI fastest — it's who can tell when the AI is wrong. He calls this verification, and argues most firms are quietly giving it away.
His sharpest example: an experienced engineer hesitates on a feature, can't quite articulate why, and writes only "not sure I'm fully comfortable with this." The AI agent summarizing the meeting sees strong customer demand and no concrete objection — and drops the hesitation entirely.
The decision moves forward on a version of reality with the one genuinely valuable signal removed.
Where does that judgment live in your company?
Thinking about a company your size: where does that kind of judgment actually live right now — the client you can tell is about to walk before they say it, the quote that looks fine on paper but you know is wrong for this customer, the hire who interviews perfectly but something's off? If you or your team start routing decisions through an AI tool without deliberately preserving that kind of hesitation, you're not saving time — you're quietly erasing the thing that actually makes your judgment worth something.
Test it out: think of one decision this week where you or someone on your team overruled a "by the numbers" recommendation — a quote, a hire, a vendor, a plan — based on a gut sense that didn't show up in any data. Write down why, specifically, before you move on. That sentence is the asset this article is actually about.
Deciding how your team uses AI without losing the judgment that matters is the kind of thing we work through in Team Coaching.
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Originally posted on LinkedIn ↗