The Days of “Winging it” Are Over
If AI is the de facto wingman, you can’t wing it.
How often have you heard (or said): “I’ll wing it,” or “It’s ok, I’m good at winging it.”?
That's a thing of the past. Way past. Like, eight months ago, way past.
We keep hearing predictions of what roles AI will replace next. Well, AI has made winging it redundant. Now everyone can be a pseudo-expert in moments and hold cursory conversations on topics they wouldn’t have otherwise. AI has made cramming for a meeting easier than ever, but you can only get by with ‘good enough’ for a couple of hours.
AI is your wingman.
So you can’t wing it if you’ve got a wingman — you have to be the star. Because everyone else has the same Goose to your Maverick. You might have perfected your routine with your favourite LLM, but getting to the same binary understanding isn’t exclusive, and no longer takes time or effort. Even if your clients, partners, or potential employers haven’t done the same pre-meeting prep, they can catch up and call your bluff faster than it takes you to order your post-meeting Lyft.
Once, when I picked my perpetually curious son up from school, he asked me a question I couldn’t answer. I admitted it. His immediate response, with a disproportionate amount of disdain, was “Google it.” Saying I didn’t know was shocking to him. He knew there was an easy way for me to find out the genus of T-rex. He just failed to understand the risk and illegality of Googling and driving.
Discovering that T-rex was a large theropod was simple once parked. But just a few years ago, doing a deep dive into an industry or product required much more than one Google search. Finding the right sources and digesting them took effort. Now, all that effort is boiled down to the right prompts, leaving all of us with the ability to be quasi-experts. Five minutes before a meeting, you can know more than you ever did. That benefit has its drawbacks, though, because it’s not your own. Everyone can arrive at the same meeting with a similar level of expertise.**
But don’t just take my word for it.
Fittingly, I asked ChatGPT if it could estimate how many people use AI to prep for a meeting. It’s answer: “Globally, likely 100–200 million people are now using AI tools to prep for meetings in some capacity.” That was backed up by use cases: “according to LinkedIn’s COO, execs use Copilot, ChatGPT and Account IQ to prep for meetings — and data shows around 75–79 % of knowledge workers use generative AI for tasks like summarization, meeting prep, and research” and a study from McKinsey stating: “over 70 % of organizations are actively using generative AI across business units, including knowledge-based tasks like meeting prep and summarization.”
If everyone is arriving with shallow knowledge and a potential lack of context, what’s the outcome? A cursory conversation where everyone uses the same words, but without lived experience, ends in confusion. At a certain point, you reach the edge of truly getting it. While you’re using the same vocabulary, there’s an excellent chance you walk away with different conclusions because words are just words without any experience of putting them into action.
If the prepping playing field is levelled, how do you prove your worth and walk away with true action items?
Show up with actual experts – people with real-life experience. Show up owning your craft. Show up prepared to demonstrate true experience — this will quickly set you apart from those who did a 5-minute, or even 20-minute, deep research dive.
How does real expertise come through?
It’s in asking smart questions — questions that only those who have lived it would ask. It’s in knowing where the pitfalls might be because you’ve fallen into them. It’s in knowing what’s been done so you can do it differently. It’s in activating what AI doesn’t have: your gut, your history, your sense of nuance, your lived experience.
Be the star.
Be Maverick. Know your talent. Know what you offer that AI doesn’t. Use real-life examples — AI doesn’t have those. (Just skip the bravado, unless you’re playing beach volleyball in perfect lighting.) Above all, leverage the research power of AI to top off your lived expertise to be the true authority.
Side note:
**Know that sometimes ChatGP hallucinates — and admits it. It claimed that “mentions of ‘using AI for meeting prep’ rose by over 300% year-over-year in 2024” on LinkedIn. Compelling. So I used it. But when I asked ChatGPT to read an almost final draft, I discovered that it had spun that stat, stating: “I couldn’t find direct support, but this would be more powerful if cited.” Imagine yourself at the table reciting false facts to someone with a deep understanding of the topic.
