Every company has fallen over itself to implement AI. No CIO or CEO can take a “wait and see” stance. Yet a 2025 Boston Consulting Group survey of 1,250 companies found that 60% reported minimal revenue or cost improvements from their AI investments, and only 5% were generating significant value at scale.
Never mind the dry stats; I love stories in which CEOs proudly (yes, proudly) eliminate staff, replace them with AI and then sheepishly admit it hadn’t worked. In 2025, Commonwealth Bank in Australia announced plans to eliminate 45 customer-service positions, relying on an AI voice bot to handle calls. The problem? The anticipated reduction in workload did not materialize. The remaining employees had to work extra hard. Eventually, the bank reversed the redundancies and APOLOGISED! (I luv that.)
This awestruck race to adopt new technologies for efficiency, only to realise you are stuck in the mud, is a recurring phenomenon going back to the printing press. Early film was just recorded theatre. Audiences sat in rows and watched footage from a fixed camera pointed at a stage, actors entering and exiting as if behind a framed arch. Then directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, in Battleship Potemkin (1925), intercut and collided images through editing, close-ups and montage, inventing a completely new language: cinema.
Early automobiles were called “horseless carriages”: a horse-carriage body, wooden wheels and tiller steering, with an engine bolted in where the horse used to be. (In the UK, the law required a man to walk in front with a red flag, and speed limits were 3.2km/h in towns and 6.4km/h in the countryside. Imagine Dubai traffic with the same.) Only later did cars find their own design. Now we have enclosed cabins, steering wheels and aerodynamic bodies, and around us are highways, suburbs and drive-through McDonald’s.
Early websites were “brochureware”: companies, happy to save money, copied their masses of printed brochures and catalogues onto bland websites. Then the web found its own grammar of search, interaction, online marketplaces, communities and platforms, turning a digital box of catalogues into places where people shop, meet and work (and watch cat videos).
You know the saying: “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
It was coined by Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian literature and media academic. He pointed out that when every new medium arrives, we force old content into the new container. So film initially contained theatre. Radio contained speeches, television contained radio plays and the first web contained brochures and newspapers. To break this rear-view mirror mindset, he proposed four questions (which he called the “tetrad”) that we should all ask:
What human faculty does it enhance? (E.g. the wheel extends the foot; TV extends the eye.)
What does it make obsolete? (The car makes walking obsolete.)
What does it retrieve from our human past? (VERY important question! The car delightfully brought back the tribal lifestyle of the wagon train! Social media brought back village gossip! Podcasts brought back campfire storytelling! You must spend time brainstorming this question!)
What does it reverse into when pushed to its extreme? (Cars bring congestion, pollution and the loss of “15-minute” lives; social media brings doomscrolling and brain rot.)
An example: the smartphone. It enhances immediate access and communication. It obsolesces numerous separate objects (camera, map, diary, calculator, music player). It retrieves something surprisingly ancient: highly personal, conversational communication. But pushed too far, the connection can reverse into distraction, isolation and an inability to disconnect.
So let’s look at AI. Get into your favourite AI and ask:
“According to Marshall McLuhan’s tetrad of media effects, analyse my role (add your CV or bio) and provide answers I should consider in redefining my role and skills for an AI world.”
Use the AI to consider the four questions for your work and profession (with my humble answers to illustrate):
Enhance: Which of my daily tasks are bottlenecked by lack of speed? (I hate doing invoices and organising my files.)
Obsolesce: What does AI push aside? (I won’t gain any more points for good-looking decks.)
Retrieve: What very human aspects can it bring back? (I LOVE telling stories! And now I can easily illustrate them!)
Reverse: What happens if it is pushed to the limit? (No copycat LinkedIn posts, no faceless videos with my voice cloned.)
Let CEOs dive into the mud. Remold your career and re-present yourself as someone who leads on AI, not someone replaced because the world is looking backwards.
