Three problems technology won’t solve
In every industry, business and team right now, there’s a lot of noise about technology - specifically about AI, automation and efficiency. If you believe what you read, there are hordes of companies replacing everything they do with agents, building the first one-person unicorn and optimising workflows for peak synthetic output.
The reality is a little different. Most of the activity is hype, and one of my core reasons for believing that we’re not far away from the AI bubble bursting is that much of the work being done is pretty trivial. While we’re definitely able to do more, faster, we’re also overlooking three fundamental problems that are yet to be solved. Our current obsession with speed is likely to throw them into even sharper relief.
The first is simple: there’s a serious lack of good ideas. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of companies are building solutions to problems that just don’t exist - not in any significant way, anyway. It’s true that Claude Code and its counterparts are cutting development timelines exponentially, but the challenge was never that we couldn’t write enough code. The true art of technology development is in uncovering genuine problems and designing elegant solutions to them in ways that delight real customers. This is where the hard work happens.
Every day, I get at least two emails offering to run AI-powered lead generation campaigns for me. All of the messages are more or less the same. Lead generation is an obvious problem to solve, and one that many businesses share. If someone could actually offer a proven, comprehensive approach to consistently sourcing great leads, I’d love to hear it. However, the lead merchants all seem to think that cranking up the volume of outreach and using clumsy “personalisation” is the answer. And as soon as one engineer with no sales experience decides to launch a lead gen start up, ten others spring up doing more or less the same thing. It’s so easy now to clone another platform, most don’t go to the effort of real discovery or original thinking.
This is compounded by the second problem: a distinct lack of vision. Plenty of people can perceive the way things are. It’s much harder to picture about how they could be different. As the world shifts under our feet and around us, we all have to make bets about the shape of the future. To build something that creates actual value, we have to see something that others don’t. Many years ago, where almost everyone saw a desert, a small handful of people saw Las Vegas. Then they built it.
Vision comes from imagination. Imagination comes from boredom. Today, we don’t allow ourselves the opportunity to be bored. We demand to be entertained at all times, and we’re all so busy that on the rare occasion we find a moment of quiet, our brains fill it with the things we have to do. As AI and automation increase the volume of content created, outreach done and advertising campaigns launched, our space for imagination will be squeezed even further. We must protect that space in our lives if we want to understand how we can improve the world around us.
The third problem is the biggest. A global lack of resilience and persistence means that even when we have a great idea and imagine how we could bring it to life, we abandon it before it has a chance to breathe.Good things take time. Important things take longer. All we see on social media, though, is founders raising $100m in six months, tripling ARR every year (never mind the profit) and 15 year olds managing seven figure exits. We’re all in such a rush now that our pursuit of rapid success stops us from achieving real progress.
We used to talk about the seven-year itch in business - the disillusionment that leaders (especially founders) encounter when they get six to eight years into a business and feel like they’re not as successful as they wanted to be. Now, it’s the seven month itch, and it’s lethal.
The answer to all three of these problems is simple. Slow down. Take time to find the problems that really need solving, whether in your business, for your customers or in your community. Sit with them, understand them and give yourself space to think deeply about them. Use your imagination. Consider what’s wrong with current approaches, and how they could be different. Worry less about someone getting there before you, and more about finding a solution that delights. Once you have it, stick with it. Keep going. Iron out the kinks, leap the hurdles and fight through the tough times.
This is your competitive advantage: people are less willing to do the hard, patient work than ever before. Will you?
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