Prompting isn’t a strategy. It’s a tactic. And when companies treat it as the whole game, they flatten what AI can actually do. Especially across the entire company with many teams and departments that have zero to do with making products, but have the potential to innovate all the same.
You’re not “working smarter” because you asked Claude to write your email thirty seconds faster. That’s not innovation—it’s intellectual laziness dressed up in a productivity metric. The real value of using this technology shows up when you actually think with it. When you use it to pressure-test your assumptions, push your thinking into unfamiliar territory, model decisions before you make them. But that requires effort. And most teams don’t want effort. They want shortcuts. They want vending machine magic.