AI keeps getting better, so why aren’t your results getting better?
Bryan Cassady’s answer:
Most people are getting more output, not better work, because they skip the thinking and go straight to the tool.
In this Substack Live we get into his Type 3 error (doing the wrong thing, fast), why objectives have to come before any tool, the real $11,000-a-year cost of AI that most leaders never count, and what a generative organization actually is. If your team has AI and still isn’t getting results, this is the conversation to watch.
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Outline
(00:00) – Bryan’s mission: a million people getting results from AI by 2027
(01:02) – Better models, worse results: the human half of the equation
(03:16) – How Bryan started: “six months ahead of everyone else”
(05:16) – Objectives first, tools second
(07:33) – The Type 3 error: doing the wrong thing, but doing it right
(09:57) – The Dan Ariely story: six months on a hallucinated theorem
(11:28) – Think first: Einstein’s 55 minutes on the problem
(15:26) – From an answer economy to a question economy
(16:20) – Strategic clarity and the $11,000 cost of AI
(18:48) – What a generative organization actually is
(24:00) – The 3% AI can’t do, and why it sets you apart
(31:00) – Bryan’s giveaways: free books, tools, and a beta course
My Takeaways
The Type 3 error. So here’s the frame I keep coming back to from this whole conversation. Bryan put it like this: a Type 3 error is when “you’re doing the wrong thing, but you do it right.” And the problem with AI is you can now do the wrong thing really fast and feel great about it the whole time. I’ve had people hand me a polished 25-page deliverable that nailed every step of a question nobody actually needed answered.
Objectives first, tools second. Bryan’s line on this is the one I’d put on the wall:
“AI first is silly. It’s like being a carpenter who wants to be a hammer-first carpenter. A hammer can do cool things, but it doesn’t do everything.”
Most leaders are out shopping the 75,000 listings on a site like There’s an AI for That (a directory of AI tools) when the real first move is naming the objective and then picking the tool that serves it. Get that order wrong and you just bought a faster way to drift.
The $11,000 nobody budgets for. Here’s the part that should stop every leader who thinks AI is a $20-a-month decision. Bryan cited a Gartner study putting the time people spend controlling, revising, and re-editing AI output at around five hours a week, which works out to roughly $11,000 a year for a typical US knowledge worker. “Do you get $11,000 more benefit from using AI? Of course you can, but only if you do it smart.”
Most don’t. And that’s before you count what poorly rolled-out AI does to a team’s trust in their own leadership.
The 3% AI can’t touch. This is where it got good. Bryan's argument, borrowed from an innovation method called TRIZ, is that about 97% of what we call innovation is really recombining things that already exist, and AI does that better than almost any human. But the last 3%, the genuinely new, the thing that doesn't exist yet, that's still you.
“Humans have an ability to look forward. AI has an ability to look backward.”
That 3% is the creativity and judgment no model hands you, which is exactly what the AI Leadership Triad is built around. Pair it with his bigger shift, that we’ve moved “from an answer economy to a question economy,” and the job gets clearer: stop racing the machine on answers and get very good at the question.
Two things Bryan is giving Leadership in Change readers:
Both of his books, free, plus his PDF innovation tools — books.genorg.ai
A free, private check on how you actually use AI: paste his assessment into ChatGPT or Claude, and it scores you 0 to 10 from your own chat history — get the assessment
A free spot as a beta tester for his new AI course (10 lessons, 10 minutes a day, with a before-and-after read on how you actually use AI) — grab a beta seat here
One Question to Sit With
When’s the last time you spent five whole minutes on the problem before you opened the AI? Bryan says when he asks a room that, almost every hand goes down. Watch the full conversation above, and then go grab Bryan’s free books and tools at books.genorg.ai.
About Bryan Cassady
Bryan Cassady is the founder of GenOrg and the author of The Generative Organization. He’s an AI keynote speaker who has trained more than 40,000 people, and says he’s now helped around 90,000 toward his goal of a million people getting real results from AI by 2027. He also sits on the board of the US association for TRIZ, the structured innovation method he teaches. Get both of his books and his innovation tools free at books.genorg.ai.
About me
Joel Salinas is an Executive AI Coach for leaders at small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits. 1:1 coaching, team workshops, and AI strategy work built around amplifying what your team is already good at. Creator of the AI Leadership Triad. He writes Leadership in Change. If you want help thinking through your own AI strategy or online presence, start here.
Written by a human, for humans.
Thank you Farida Khalaf, Claire Machado, Duncan The Sage, and many others for tuning into my live video with Bryan Cassady! Join me for my next live video in the app.
