At some point, we decided that using a computer meant learning someone else’s tool. Excel, Salesforce, SAP, whatever the platform was. You learned the tool, you got certified in the tool, and then you spent your career doing manual work inside the tool. Computer literacy got reduced to software proficiency.
That’s a weird place to have landed. Computers are general purpose machines. They can be made to do almost anything. But for most people, “what can I do with a computer” became “what can I do inside this application.” The idea that you could use a computer to reshape your own work, to build something that eliminates the tedious parts of your day, that stayed locked inside engineering departments. It never went mainstream.
Managing twelve people doing manual work gets you a promotion. Eliminating the need for those twelve roles gets you a pat on the back and maybe a pizza party.
And the incentives never pushed it that direction either. For decades, the career move wasn’t to ask “how can I solve this so no one has to do it.” It was to ask “how large of a team can I get to do it,” because headcount looks better on a CV than efficiency. Managing twelve people doing manual work gets you a promotion. Eliminating the need for those twelve roles gets you a pat on the back and maybe a pizza party.
So we ended up where we are. People copying data from one system into another. Pulling numbers from an email and typing them into a spreadsheet and then again into a SaaS CRM. Reconciling information across three different tools because none of them talk to each other. All of it done manually, on machines that could be doing it automatically, by people whose time would be better spent on work that actually requires their brain.
What changed
What AI actually did, the thing worth paying attention to, is make the computer seem more accessible than it ever has. For the first time, an average business user can describe a problem in plain language and start exploring what’s possible without needing to understand the deep ins and outs of how the technology works. The gap between “I have this problem” and “a computer could solve this” used to require an engineer in the middle. That gap is shrinking. People are starting to see the possibilities that were always there, just hidden behind a wall of technical knowledge they were never expected to climb.