You’re not behind. You’re measuring the wrong thing

By Paul J Cramer · Livefront

I was on the West Coast recently for work.

One night I didn't have dinner plans. I was honestly looking forward to it.

Chipotle. Shitty TV. Done.

I opened the app and immediately got annoyed. I've been ordering the same meal for almost fifteen years. Same thing. Every time. I hit "order again," got to payment, and had to manually change my location.

My phone already knew where I was.

I finished the order and got prompted: "Do you want guac?"

I have never once ordered guac.

Come on!

The opportunity isn't more AI. It's better decisions.

That's what I keep noticing right now. I spend most of my time in rooms with product leaders, technology leaders, people who have been thinking about this longer than I have. I see the decks. Pilots. Roadmaps. Vendor conversations. Everyone has something in motion.

But when you get into how work is actually getting done, how customers are actually being served, how products are actually being used, it doesn't seem like much has changed.

Yeah. I know.

Developers are more productive. Copilots are everywhere. Code ships faster.

That feels like table stakes now.

Because customers are still jumping between apps. Still searching for information that should already know where they are. Still doing work that feels heavier than it should.

It doesn't feel like intelligence. It feels like the same product with something layered on top of it.

We're measuring activity and calling it progress.

Most of the conversations I hear sound the same.

"How can we automate this? How can we reduce cost? How can we do more with less?"

Which makes sense. That's how we've always thought about technology. Make things faster. Make things cheaper. Make things more efficient.

But that's not the shift that's actually happening.

There's a line in Moneyball I keep coming back to. The argument isn't about buying players. It's about buying wins.

Most companies right now are buying players.

More automation. Faster code. Cheaper operations. Real progress by every metric they're tracking. And their customers still have to manually change their location in a Chipotle app.

The inputs got better. The experience didn't. And nobody's measuring the gap, because the gap isn't in the dashboard.

Apple highlights where the market is actually heading.

Then you look at Apple. And you realize they've made a different decision entirely.

Not bigger models. Not more cloud. Not another API layer to a foundation model sitting in a data center somewhere. The device. The phone. Local compute. Intelligence that lives with the user, not somewhere else waiting to be summoned.

That's a different direction. Less about responding. More about understanding.

The Chipotle app knows my order. My phone knows my location. Neither of those systems talk to each other in any way that changes my experience. The intelligence is there. The connection isn't.

That's not an AI problem. That's a decision about where intelligence is supposed to live and the assumption, still baked into most products, is "somewhere in the cloud."

That assumption is what most companies are missing. We're talking about AI like it's a feature. A capability. Something we can layer into what we already built without rethinking where it lives or what it's supposed to do. The companies trying to layer their way through this shift are going to find themselves in the same place Chipotle is, technically capable of knowing me, but still asking if I want guac.

I don’t think most companies are behind.

I think they’re measuring the wrong outcomes. Solving the wrong problem. Calling it progress.

I know intimately how easy it is to confuse activity with progress. I've done it. Getting something done feels like moving forward. It isn't always.

The question shouldn't be "how much AI are we running?" It's simpler than that.

When did your product - or more importantly your company - last do something for your customer before they had to ask?

If you're struggling to answer that, the decks and the pilots and the roadmaps aside, that's the gap. That's where the real work is.

Paul Cramer is a Growth Architect at Livefront and the author of Burnt Peanut Butter Toast. He writes about fear, survival patterns, and the gap between what we build and what we tell ourselves we've built.

Interested in a Signal Audit conversation: pcramer@livefront.com