Brijesh Bharadwaj@bbharadwaj
Most managers earned their role by being one of the best ICs on the team.
It's time to be one again.
Most Managers come up the ranks as top ICs.
So in a pre-AI world, when someone said "this is going to take 3 weeks," they knew if that was true because they had done it themselves.
Now think about post-AI work world.
Most current managers have never been an IC with AI at their disposal.
They don't really know what's possible or how long stuff should take.
We see this play out at Segwise all the time.
A founder or head of growth finds us, the value prop clicks.
AI creative tagging, agentic creative analytics, competitor insights and creative generation.
All makes sense. So they send us to their team.
And then they step back.
Then the team evaluates.
But look, most people don't want change.
Their work life is fine right now. They have a process for tagging creatives in spreadsheets, they know how to pull reports from each ad network manually.
It works fine.
A new tool means relearning how they do their job differently.
It could be better, but it is definitely going to be different.
The best teams look forward to such exploration.
But there are also teams which do not want this change, and they go back and say - "Hey I don't think we need this."
In the meantime, our CS team has been chasing them to get on training calls and trying to show them how to get the best out of the free trial.
Every AI founder has dealt with this.
The manager takes that at face value because they don't have the instincts to challenge it anymore.
They haven't used the tool.
They can't tell the difference between "this genuinely doesn't work" and "I just don't want things to change."
Because they don't have the IC instincts for the AI version of the job they were great at.
Change creates chaos and most people don't want chaos in their work life.
But if you're a leader evaluating AI tools right now, you have to become the IC again.
You were one of the best with dumber tools.
You have to be one again, at least until your instincts become sharp again.
Sit with the new AI tools. Do the actual IC work.
Get a feel for what's possible now, not what someone told you is possible.
Otherwise you'll keep hearing "it's not ready" while your competitors bolt ahead.
