Even the power users feel behind: We just don't say it

I told my CTO recently that he would have to pry Claude out of my cold dead hands before I'd do my job without it. I use it every single day - for strategy documents, for synthesizing research, for thinking through problems I haven't fully formed yet. By most measures, I am a power user. 

And yet, quietly, I wonder if I'm using it to a fraction of its potential. 

I don't proactively hunt down new features. I'm not a sophisticated prompt engineer. I don't read the release notes. I just open the tool and work. And because the tool improves so continuously - new capabilities, new context, new ways of reasoning that weren't there last month - there's a persistent low-grade feeling that I'm always slightly behind. Not failing. Not lost. Just not keeping up. 

I've spent decades at the intersection of AI and human behavior. I built the first conversational AI system at Autodesk. I led customer success at Soul Machines when we were literally trying to make AI feel human. I've spoken about AI at Bloomberg, been featured in Vogue and Fast Company, argued publicly that the human element is the determining factor in whether AI succeeds or fails. If anyone should feel settled in their relationship with this technology, it's me. 

And I still feel this. 

The Problem Isn't the Pace of Deployment 

There's a lot of conversation right now about change fatigue in AI adoption - the idea that organizations are deploying tools faster than their people can process them. That's real. But I think it misses something more fundamental. 

The deeper exhaustion isn't about how fast companies roll out new tools. It's that the tools themselves never stop changing. With most technology, there's a learning curve and then a plateau. You get good at it, feel competent, move on. AI doesn't work that way. The tools today are meaningfully different from the tools six months ago. The finish line keeps moving. And that creates a psychological experience that's genuinely new: you can be a daily, committed, expert-level user and still feel like a beginner. 

There's a concept in behavioral science called the open loop: the cognitive weight of tasks that can never be fully closed. AI tools create an open loop around competence itself. You never quite arrive. That's not a flaw in the technology. But it is a real human cost that almost no one is talking about honestly. And until we name it, we can't address it. 

The Velocity Problem Nobody Is Talking About 

I'm sharing this because the people least likely to admit uncertainty are the ones most worth hearing it from. Senior leaders - especially women in tech - are not often rewarded for saying "I'm not sure I'm doing this right." We've spent careers proving we belong in the room. Admitting uncertainty about the industry's most hyped technology can feel like professional risk. 

But that discomfort is telling us that the adoption gap the industry keeps puzzling over isn't primarily a training problem or a deployment problem. It's a velocity problem. The rate at which AI is evolving is genuinely faster than the rate at which any working professional can meaningfully absorb. That's not a personal failing. It's arithmetic. 

Organisations that understand this will build for adoption differently, creating space for people to learn constantly and bringing human-systems expertise to the table before decisions are final. They'll treat the human side of AI not as a change management afterthought, but as a strategic imperative. 

I want to name something that doesn't get named enough: 

Feeling behind is not evidence of inadequacy. It is the entirely rational response to technology that was designed to keep moving. 

One of the most useful contributions any of us in tech leadership can make right now isn't to pretend we've mastered the tools. It's to say - out loud - that mastery isn't the point. Keeping up isn't the point. The point is staying curious, staying in it, and making space for everyone else to do the same - without having to perform confidence we don't feel.