The meetings AI couldn't cut down

Thanks to AI tools (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT), Dan Sirk can now build websites on his own far faster than before, and finish messaging strategy work in under 8 hours instead of 1 week.

But the bottleneck in his work wasn't code — it was meetings. While serving as CMO for two companies at once, he's already handling around 10 meetings a week, and while he thinks he could take on a third company, going beyond that is essentially impossible.

The core point of the article is that while AI greatly boosts the productivity of knowledge work, it's simultaneously increasing the share of human tasks like coordination, persuasion, and taking responsibility for approvals.

• AI speeds up writing memos, generating code, analysis, and prototyping.
• But final decisions, budget approvals, persuading customers, and internal alignment still have to be done by people.
• Harvard's David Deming believes that as information becomes more abundant, the ability to organize and deliver it like a story becomes even more important.

Real-world cases point in the same direction. A data scientist at a software company said that since AI now writes code and even performs analysis, hiring has shifted its focus away from mere coding skill and toward the ability to find good ideas and persuade colleagues.

KPMG explained that while AI is eroding some areas of deep expertise, it's raising the value of generalists who build strong client relationships and drive things forward. A Salesforce customer success staffer emphasized that even though chatbots now handle some tasks, the role of listening to customers' anxieties and concerns and building trust is hard to replace.

In the PolicyFly case, AI cut customer onboarding time from 6 months to about 2 weeks, but what customers still wanted was interaction with a human. Because the process of aligning the interests of multiple departments and providing reassurance still remains, this leads to the conclusion that the more AI automates, the more meetings that require humans actually increase.