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AI Is Quietly Making You Worse at Your Job — Here's the Fix
This week we sat down with Rob Butler, founder of Kaleido Projects, who's spent his career moving from project management into data analytics and AI and has strong views on where it's quietly going wrong.
🎧 Short on time? Hit play on the full episode here — it's a proper deep dive on graph databases, AI coding and decision intelligence in project controls.
Rob's argument is uncomfortable but hard to dismiss: lean on AI to do your thinking and you slowly hollow out the judgment that made you good in the first place. The tools write the code, surface the answer, fill in the gap and the muscle you used to flex starts to waste. It's not the AI that's the problem. It's how thoughtlessly we hand it the wheel.
The fix, he reckons, isn't to back away from the technolog, it's to use a smarter shape of it. We get into graph databases and knowledge graphs, and why they beat a flat spreadsheet at finding the patterns that actually matter on complex projects. From there it's a short hop to "decision intelligence": using AI to frame the context and the trade-offs, not just spit out a number you're tempted to trust blindly.
We also get into the bits people skirt around, the risks and alignment questions baked into advanced models, what happens when AI runs inside critical systems, and why the human who frames the context still does the most important job in the room. Rob's take on collective intelligence and agent networks is one of the more grounded versions of that conversation we've had on the show.
Why it matters: the people who get left behind won't be the ones who refused to use AI — they'll be the ones who used it so passively they stopped thinking for themselves. The edge is in knowing what to ask, and what to keep doing yourself.
👉 Listen to the full conversation with Rob Butler — it's worth your commute.
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They texted. They DM'd. They moved on.
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