The Two Speeds of AI: Why Leaders Feel Behind… And How to Regain Control
While AI moves at light speed, humans don’t.
If you’re leading a team, a business, or a department, you’re likely feeling a specific kind of low-grade anxiety right now. No matter how much you read or how many tools you try, it still feels like you’re always behind.
Here’s the truth: You aren’t slow. You’re fighting on two fronts.
And until you understand that “AI speed” isn’t just one thing – it’s actually two distinct forces pulling you in opposite directions – you’ll keep losing the battle.
Macro Speed vs. Micro Speed
1. Macro Speed: The Velocity of Change
Macro Speed is an external pressure. Every week brings a new model, a new capability, a new company, a new tool, or a new distraction. Your social feeds and email are flooded. People ask if you’ve seen the latest thing.
The Feeling: “If I don’t learn everything now, I’ll be obsolete.”
The Reality: Trying to “drink from the firehose” is impossible.
When you try to keep up with everything, you master nothing. You become a collector of bookmarks, not a builder of capability.
The leaders who are actually succeeding with AI aren’t the ones who know every tool. They’re the ones who’ve learned to filter and ignore most of the noise.
2. Micro Speed: The Velocity of Production
Micro Speed is an internal pressure. When you sit down to use AI, it generates output almost instantly. You ask for a strategy; it gives you 2,000 words. You ask for code; it gives you three variations. You ask for a draft; it gives you five approaches you hadn’t considered.
The Feeling: “I’m drowning in drafts.” Blank Page Paralysis has been replaced by something worse: Analysis Paralysis at scale.
The Reality: The tool moves faster than your thinking process. Without a clear filter, it overwhelms instead of assisting you.
The irony is that this tool that was supposed to save us time now consumes it in a different way. We’ve replaced the blank page problem with a new one: too many mediocre drafts and no clear direction.
The Solution
The counterintuitive truth is that we shouldn’t speed up to match the machine.
It’s about having the discipline to slow down.
Those who are getting real value from AI aren’t the ones who continuously switch between tools. Rather, they’re the clearest thinkers who have learned to decouple their brain from the machine’s relentlessness.
Here’s a mental model I find useful:
Rule 1: Just-in-Time Learning
Solving Macro Speed
Stop trying to “learn AI.” That’s like trying to “learn the Internet”. The landscape is too vast, changing too fast, and most of it is irrelevant to your actual work.
Instead, adopt a just-in-time philosophy: learn the specific tool or feature required to solve the problem directly in front of you. Everything else is noise.
The goal is to be strategically focused rather than trying to know everything.
You need to know what matters for your business, your team, your current priorities.
The Macro Speed problem isn’t solved by consuming more AI sources faster, it’s solved by consuming less, with more intention.
The Action:
- Regularly check only a couple of trusted AI sources
- Ask: “Does this solve a real problem today?”
- Use a “Parking Lot” notebook for non-urgent tools
- Review that list every so often
Rule 2: Think First
Solving Micro Speed
The biggest mistake smart people make is using AI to find their strategy. They open ChatGPT or Gemini before they even know what they want, hoping the machine will figure it out for them.
It won’t.
When we rush to the prompt, we get chaos. Endless variations with no clear winner, each one spawning three more questions.
And sometimes that chaos is useful, especially when we’re brainstorming.
But most of the time it’s better to slow down and define what we actually need, so we get results we can use.
Here’s the discipline: Don’t open the AI interface until you’ve figured out exactly what you want. Write it down if you need that for discipline.
This action will slow your thinking and help you get strategic before the machine kicks in.
Define three things:
- Goal: What specific outcome do I need? Not a vague “help with marketing” but “help me plan the steps to create an email campaign to re-engage dormant customers”
- Audience: Who is this for? What do they care about?
- Constraints: What are the boundaries? Length, tone, format, what it must include, what it must avoid?
This is the shift from operator to architect.
An operator sits at the prompt box, typing variations, hoping something good emerges. An architect knows what good looks like before the first word is generated. The architect has a blueprint and the AI is the builder following the plans.
Be the architect before you hire the builder.
When you show up with clarity, the AI becomes genuinely useful. When you show up hoping the AI will provide the clarity, you get expensive confusion.
Rule 3: The “Editor-in-Chief” Shift
Solving Both Speeds
When AI generates content at light speed, your role fundamentally changes. You are no longer the generator. You are the editor-in-chief.
Think of every AI output as a rough draft from a talented but inexperienced intern. This intern is fast, energetic, and has read everything on the internet. They’re also prone to confident mistakes, subtle misunderstandings, and a tendency to give you more when you asked for better.
Your value isn’t the 10 seconds it took to generate the draft. Your value is the 20 minutes you spend:
- Verifying: Is this actually accurate?
- Refining: What’s missing or unnecessary?
- Humanising: Where does this need your voice or judgment?
The Action:
- never copy-paste AI output directly
- build in “editor time” for every draft
- define a “good enough” standard
The paradox of AI productivity: the tool makes generation free, which makes curation the scarce skill. The leaders who win aren’t the ones who generate the most. They’re the ones with the best filters.
This is part of a bigger shift in how we relate to AI.
I think of it as moving between “Butler Mode” (AI executes your clear instructions) and “Advisor Mode” (AI thinks alongside you). [Read more on this in Butler vs Advisor]
The editor-in-chief role lives in that second mode – you’re not just delegating tasks, you’re collaborating on quality. I’ll explore this distinction more in a future post.
The Architect’s Mindset
These three rules share a common thread: They’re all about reclaiming your role as the thinker, not just the doer.
| The Operator | The Architect |
|---|---|
| Tries to keep up with every AI development | Learns just-in-time, ignores the rest |
| Opens the prompt box hoping for clarity | Arrives with clarity already defined |
| Generates output and hopes it’s good | Knows what good looks like before starting |
| Measures productivity by volume | Measures productivity by value delivered |
| Feels constantly behind | Feels strategically focused |
The operator is exhausted, overwhelmed, and drowning in drafts.
The architect is calm, clear, and producing work that actually matters.
The difference isn’t intelligence or technical skill. It’s discipline. It’s the willingness to slow down when everything around you is screaming to speed up.
The Bottom Line
This isn’t just personal productivity advice. These two speeds affect your entire organisation.
Your team is drowning in new tool options (Macro Speed). Your people are burying themselves in low-quality AI output (Micro Speed). And without a clear framework, everyone defaults to “try to go faster” – which only makes both problems worse.
You don’t need to move faster. You need a better filter.
You need to shift from operator to architect – not just for yourself, but for your entire team.
Once you’ve made that shift, the next question becomes: when should AI simply execute your instructions versus when should it help you think? I call these “Butler Mode” and “Advisor Mode” – but that’s a topic for another post. The foundation is what we’ve covered here: you can’t use AI well in either mode until you’ve slowed down enough to know which one you need.
If This Resonates
Most teams I talk to don’t need more tools. They need someone to help them see what’s actually causing friction.
If you want to identify exactly where these bottlenecks are showing up in your business – where Macro distractions are wasting attention and Micro chaos is wasting effort – I’d recommend starting with our 60-Minute AI Opportunity Audit. Let’s have a quick chat to see if that’s a good fit.
We won’t throw more tools at you. We’ll look at your specific workflows, identify what to ignore, and help you build processes that ship value, not just volume.
Because the goal was never to go faster.
The goal was to go better.
What’s your biggest challenge right now – Macro Speed (too many options) or Micro Speed (too much output)? Connect and let me know.
