Most people are using AI like a vending machine
I’ve now run enough sessions with senior people to have watched the same thing happen dozens of times, and it always goes the same way.
Someone opens a fresh window. They type in a rushed half-sentence of what they want. They hit enter expecting a miracle. They get something generic and slightly wrong. And I can watch the conclusion form on their face in real time: this is overrated, it doesn’t get me, the hype was a lie.
They’re treating it like a vending machine. Coin in, miracle out. And when the miracle doesn’t drop, they kick the machine.
What they’re missing
The people who get extraordinary things out of these tools aren’t smarter or more technical. They’ve just worked out that a good output isn’t a single move, it’s a sequence.
They research first, letting the tool go and gather the real material before asking it to produce anything. Then they plan: shape the approach, argue with it, cut the bad ideas, all before a single word of the final thing gets written. Only then do they generate, and even then they groom what comes back, give feedback, push it back, shape it toward what they actually meant.
Research, then plan, then groom, then generate. Most people skip straight to generate and wonder why it feels like slop.
Think about the difference between asking a stranger to write your keynote in one shot and briefing a sharp assistant over the course of a morning. Same person, wildly different result. The only variable is whether you treated it like a conversation or a vending machine.
Why smart people fall for it
Here’s the strange part: the vending machine trap catches experienced people worst.
The interface lies to them. It looks like a search box, and they’ve got twenty years of muscle memory telling them a search box takes a short query and returns an answer. So they bring search-box behaviour to a tool that rewards the opposite, and their seniority works against them.
The junior who never learned the search-box habit often gets better results, because they’re willing to just… talk to it. Explain. Go back and forth. Treat it like a colleague rather than a machine that owes them an answer.
The unlock
If you take one thing from a session with me it’s usually this: slow down at the start. The quality of what you get out is set almost entirely by the quality of the setup, and the setup is the part everyone rushes.
It’s closer to a very fast, very literal colleague who’ll do exactly what you asked, which is only a problem because you haven’t been asking properly.
The version you haven’t met yet
And there’s a further step most people don’t know exists, because the vending machine framing hides it completely.
Everything so far still has you starting the interaction. You ask, it answers. The version that actually changes how a company runs doesn’t wait for you at all. It runs on a schedule, or the moment something in your systems trips a wire. A metric crosses a line and it flags the owner with the reason and a suggested next step. An error spike happens at 3am and it pulls the logs, works out the likely cause, and leaves you a summary instead of a red light.
Same engine. The only difference is what sets it off: you, the clock, or the world. Most people never get past the first one, because they’re still standing at the vending machine waiting to be served when they could have hired something that works while they sleep.
Stop kicking the machine. It was never a machine. Once that clicks, people stop telling me the tech is overrated and start telling me they can’t remember how they worked before it. The model didn’t change. Only the way they reached for it did.