AI Broke the Rungs

Twenty years ago I was a young consultant, about a month into a new client, sitting across from their CTO. He asked what value we were going to create. So I told him. Facts, figures, data points, projections. I talked for five minutes straight.

He was a patient leader. He almost let me finish, and asked me to stop.

He walked to his whiteboard and drew a pyramid. Four layers. Data on the bottom. Information above it. Then knowledge. Wisdom at the top.

Every conversation lives somewhere on that pyramid, he told me. And right then I was parked at the very bottom, vomiting data on his desk. Not because data is bad, but because I had not done anything with it yet. Data only earns its keep when you climb it into information, push it into knowledge, and then earn your way to wisdom.

His real point was simpler. Time is precious. Respect it. Decide what altitude the moment calls for before you open your mouth.

I carried that pyramid for two decades. It shaped how I talk to a CEO versus an engineer. It taught me the climb was the work, and the climb took years.

It is 2026, and I’m staring at the collapse of the climb. AI broke the rungs. All of them.

What took me twenty years to learn, moving from raw data up to something worth an executive’s attention, a model traverses in seconds. Hand it the bottom layer, ask for the top, and it skips every floor in between. The pyramid was built on scarcity: the slow, expensive, human work of turning data into something wise. That scarcity is gone.

So the shape changes. A pyramid is a climb. A cube is a space you move through. Every layer available at once, from any direction, the data, the knowledge, and the reasoning that connects them sitting in one volume you can query. Ours connects curated data, classic machine learning, inference, and agents, all productized into reusable blocks that hold our collective wisdom.

But there is a part of this the machine will not do for you. Yet.

While it can prep you, it cannot stand under the light with you. When the curve balls come and it is your room, your board, you have to be human.

The legwork is built. The richest insights are curated and ready to serve every corner of the enterprise. The story for the board is ready. But no model can shape that story for all the individual ears that need to hear it, let alone digest it. That part is yours. Navigate those waters, and bring a bag of patience. It is not easy.