Every AI project I've shipped has made some individual step faster — a report, an analysis, a draft. Almost none of them, by themselves, made the overall process faster. The gap between those two facts took me longer to notice than I'd like to admit.
The pattern, once I started looking for it, was almost always the same: the bottleneck wasn't the task. It was the handoff around the task. Work would finish faster on my end and then sit exactly as long as it always had, waiting for someone else to pick it up, review it, or sign off on it.
AI is very good at collapsing the time a single person spends on a single step. It has nothing to say about the time a piece of work spends waiting between two people who each assume the other one has it. That waiting time doesn't show up on anyone's task list, which is exactly why it's so easy to miss.
The uncomfortable version of this note: a lot of what looks like an AI adoption problem is actually an accountability design problem that AI adoption made visible for the first time. Speeding up my part of a handoff didn't fix the handoff. It just moved the wait to a spot where it was more obvious.
I don't think the fix is a better prompt or a better workflow tool. I think it's going back to the handoff itself and asking who actually owns the decision on the other side of it — a much less exciting project than automating the step, and usually the one that actually matters.
Current Hypothesis
AI shortens how long a task takes. It doesn't shorten how long a decision takes to travel between two people who each assume the other owns it.
Not a conclusion — a working idea, revisited as evidence comes in.