AI is in a remarkable surge right now. The explosion of large language models — from GPT to Gemini to Claude and beyond — has fundamentally changed what we expect from software. Tools that once required teams of engineers and months of fine-tuning can now be assembled in days. That's not hyperbole; it's the lived reality for anyone building in this space in 2023 and 2024. The capability curve has been almost vertical.
But here's the thing I keep coming back to: for all their power, today's AI systems are fundamentally reactive. They wait. You have to walk up to them, type something, hit send, and only then do they spring to life. The model doesn't know you slept badly, that your biggest client emailed at 2 AM, or that your quarterly review is tomorrow. It knows nothing until you tell it. Prompting is the bottleneck — and it puts the cognitive burden squarely back on you, the very person the tool is supposed to help.
The next wave, I believe, is proactive AI. Instead of sitting idle until you summon it, AI will watch the world on your behalf — monitoring your calendar, your inbox, your projects, your finances — and surface insights, take action, or ask a clarifying question before you even realize you had a problem to solve. Imagine waking up to a daily briefing prepared by an agent that already reviewed your meetings, flagged a contract renewal slipping through the cracks, and drafted three response options for that tricky stakeholder email. You didn't prompt it. It just knew.
This shift matters deeply to me on a personal level, especially when I think about the areas where I'm genuinely weaker — marketing, social media, personal branding. I'm a builder and a strategist, but consistently showing up online, crafting the right message, knowing when to post — that's never been where I naturally shine. A proactive AI agent that understands my voice, my audience, and my goals could handle the distribution layer almost entirely, freeing me to focus on the thinking and the building. It's not about replacing judgment; it's about offloading the mechanics so judgment can go further.
There's a counterintuitive idea buried in all of this that I find genuinely exciting: AI may not reduce the total amount of meaningful work we do — it may dramatically increase it. Think about what it means to lead people. The highest-value activities I do as a leader involve real conversations: one-on-ones, staff meetings, problem-solving sessions, coaching moments. Those interactions are rich and irreplaceable. But they're also time-bounded. There are only so many hours in a day, which means only so many people I can engage with deeply.
With proactive AI as a force multiplier, that changes. If an AI agent can prepare me for each conversation, summarize context, surface what a person needs, and follow up afterward — I could engage meaningfully with far more people than I could today. The AI doesn't replace the human conversation; it makes more of them possible. That's not a reduction in work. That's an expansion of reach, empathy, and impact. And to me, that future is worth building toward.