I Spent 2 Years Calling AI Overrated. Here's What Changed My Mind in 72 Hours.

I need to tell you something, and it’s not easy to write.

For two years, I was the person at the conference table who rolled her eyes when someone mentioned AI. I was the consultant who told clients to “wait it out.” I said things like “glorified autocomplete” with the confidence of someone who had already made up her mind.

I was THAT person. And I was wrong.

Why I Was Skeptical

My skepticism wasn’t born from ignorance. It was born from experience. I’d sat through dozens of vendor demos where AI tools hallucinated answers with breathtaking confidence. I’d watched companies pour six figures into chatbot implementations that customers hated.

The hype cycle was real. Every startup was “AI-powered.” And most of them were just if-else statements wearing a trench coat.

So when a client asked me to oversee a 72-hour AI pilot, I agreed with the energy of someone humoring a friend’s new hobby.

Hour 1–8: The First Crack

The team had set up an agentic workflow using Claude to process a backlog of customer dispute tickets. I expected the usual: confident-sounding garbage.

Instead, I watched Claude pull the relevant clause from a 47-page contract, cross-reference it against the shipment record, and draft a resolution email that was better than what their senior account managers typically produced. It caught a billing discrepancy that had been sitting in the system for three months.

Hour 24–36: The Pattern Emerges

By morning, the system had processed 142 tickets. We audited a random sample of 30.

Twenty-seven out of thirty were accurate and actionable. Of the remaining three, two had minor formatting issues. One had genuinely misinterpreted a clause — and it had flagged its own uncertainty.

This wasn’t a demo. This was production data, running unsupervised overnight, handling real complexity. And it was working.

Hour 48–72: The Worldview Shift

On the third day, the team showed me a multi-agent system where one agent researched carrier performance data, another analyzed shipping patterns, and a third generated recommendations for renegotiating freight contracts. The whole thing ran in about nine minutes.

That analysis would have taken a consultant like me the better part of a week.

I’d been asking the wrong question for two years. I kept asking “Can AI do this job?” The right question was “Can AI change how this job gets done?” The answer is an overwhelming yes.

What I Tell Clients Now

First, stop asking if AI can replace your people. Ask where they’re spending time on work beneath their expertise.

Second, pilot before you plan. Run a focused 72-hour pilot on a real workflow with real data.

Third, build for the agent era. Agentic workflows and multi-agent systems are where transformation happens.

Fourth, keep your skepticism. Just update it. Move from “Does this work at all?” to “Where exactly does it work, and where does it break?”

The evidence is overwhelming now. And I’d rather be right than consistent.