AI eats the middle: human effort shifts to strategy and judgment

Pre-AI, the bulk of professional work happened in the middle — execution, drafting, research — with only a little time spent on either bookend: figuring out what to do (strategy, hypothesis) at the start, and reviewing and communicating the work at the end. Those bookends are actually the really important, meaty part of the work. With AI, the middle gets eaten — AI does all that execution work on your behalf — and you're freed up to focus on the beginning and the end. You get to deploy your judgment, your taste, all that accrued knowledge and everything that makes you great as a professional, right where it matters most.