In 2022, right after ChatGPT came out, I became incredibly annoying on Zoom.
I’d jump into meetings and ask whether anyone had tried it yet. If they said no, I’d buck the agenda.
“Hang on. Just look at this.”
The outputs weren’t even that good yet. But it felt magical to me.
I’ve always known the human mind to be weird and wonderful. I know this from personal experience. Every person has dozens of ideas floating around their head that have never escaped their imagination — trapped, abandoned, aborted.
With ChatGPT, it felt like I was finally interacting with something that could get me closer to making more of my ideas reality.
Even back then, I saw AI for what it was. And I told everyone who would listen.
AI is middleware for the human imagination.
I said it even before it was true. Because I could see how AI would become a manifestation engine – a genie in a bottle – to make real what we think should exist in the world but are not yet able to materialize on our own.
I flash back to myself at age 15. In grade 9, I was forced to take an art class to graduate.
I was terrible.
My art teacher would laugh at me because I couldn’t draw. I couldn’t paint. And I was frustrated. Because the images in my head were there – alive in my imagination. I just couldn’t get them onto the canvas.
That’s a feeling I think a lot of us have lived with.
We’ve all had ideas and instincts about things we wanted to make, build, draw, write, test or bring to life.
But between imagination and reality, a lot of it died.
That changes now.
For most of history, much of human imagination was trapped.
You could be lit up by a new idea and have the conviction to make it real. But without resources — technical skills, the team size, the budget — manifesting that idea into reality was an uphill battle.
Organizations did not have the same limits on resources.
We began to organize our businesses as machines to harvest someone's imagination — but not necessarily our own. We’ve been given a paycheck to be in service to someone else’s ideas.
Organizations capitalized on the fact that not everyone’s imagination could be realized.
The design was always the same: find an advantage, build a machine around it, optimize and protect it, then harvest it for as long as possible.
In the past, that was enough.
But even in just the last 3 months, that structure has become outdated.
More than ever before — and as I hoped in 2022 — AI is further along its spectrum, evolving into middleware for human imagination.
In the last few weeks, I’ve been on the verge of tears multiple times.
I've never written a line of code. And suddenly I'm building prototypes of possibility in minutes — sharing them, iterating on them, pulling others into the process.
I’m moved and I’m optimistic, not only for myself but for others.
Yesterday
Yesterday, our organizations worked like assembly lines. Businesses were built around one good idea, one unique innovation.
An organization then became a machine to harvest advantage from that single idea, structured for repetition and scale.
But assembly lines and machines are rigid. They are not built for a constant stream of new ideas.
AI is changing the definition of how a business should be structured.
When AI acts as middleware for human imagination, we’re no longer limited to rigid business infrastructure built around a single idea.
In fact, building that way is the shortest path to rapid advantage decay.
The new advantage is how we tap into imagination to continuously harvest new ideas and build our infrastructure to flex around them.
Yes, the fear that AI generates is also warranted. It will replace jobs and tasks. At the same time, it will evolve the jobs and tasks that humans do.
In that evolution lies an opportunity to design something new.
Tomorrow
Tomorrow’s organizations look more like a living organism.
Execution is cheaper and faster. So imagination matters more.
We have to throw out the old structure and build an ecosystem to harvest curiosity, taste and judgement.
Organizations must find new advantage in how they generate and act on new human-inspired possibilities from within.
That’s what I mean when I say AI is middleware for the human imagination.
The bottleneck is moving from execution to imagination.
AI can execute. But people must know what they want to create.
Organizations now have a commercial and existential responsibility to tie imagination to value.
One way that happens is by making time for humans to gather around the proverbial campfire.
Conversation is part of the new production line – both humans thinking together and with AI.
And leaders must evolve, too. Our job is shifting from controlling execution to creating the conditions where conversation, curiosity and experimentation are fostered and harvested.
Instead of asking our people about outputs and deliverables, we ask them things like:
What do you envision?
What do you care enough to build?
What do you want to bring to life?
Now’s our moment to reflect and reorient.
I’ll leave you with these questions:
Where in your organization are you using AI to optimize an advantage that is quietly decaying underneath?
Is your organization using AI to move faster — or to create possibilities that didn't exist before?
Where would you direct your organization's energy if execution wasn't the bottleneck?
When did your organization last make room for an idea that didn't have a business case yet?
This is the most exciting shift of my lifetime. I believe we are on the verge of an explosion of human innovation.
In 2022, I hoped that AI would help more of human imagination make contact with reality.
Today, that hope is coming true – more so by the day.
– Nish
A gratitude P.S.
Every year on my birthday, I send a list of things I’m grateful for — one for each year. This year it’s 54.
This photo below represents one of those things.
That’s me with Ryan Holiday at his recent event in Phoenix.
His book, The Obstacle Is the Way, was part of how I stopped seeing my disability as something that happened to me and started seeing it as something that happened for me.
Got to meet him. Got to thank him.
He didn’t know I existed when he wrote it. He just put the work out.
That's what legacy is. Not your name on a building. Not a line on a balance sheet. Something felt, by someone you'll never meet, at exactly the moment they need it.
It’s why I’m launching this newsletter this week, to mark my 54th birthday.
I don’t know who needs it. I just know I have to put it out.
