Why the real crisis isn’t artificial intelligence — it’s misaligned incentives, and how SMBs can reclaim control.
“Everything you know about AI is wrong.”
For decades, we’ve been told that every new technology marks the next great leap for humanity. Faster. Smarter. More efficient.
The technologist’s story has always been the same: if we build it, they will come — or get run over by it.
But here’s what they don’t tell you: AI isn’t separate from us. AI is us, systematized.
The myth isn’t that AI is dangerous or miraculous. The myth is that AI operates independently — that it’s something happening to us rather than something reflecting us back to ourselves.
AI doesn’t think. It processes patterns we feed it. It doesn’t decide. It executes priorities we embed in it. It doesn’t create bias. It reveals the bias already present in our data, our assumptions, our blind spots.
When we mistake the tool for the master, we surrender the one thing that makes technology valuable: human intention.
And that surrender? It’s exactly what the current system was designed to extract from you.
Last week, a $12M consulting firm CEO told me: “I’m afraid if I don’t adopt AI, I’ll fall behind. But I’m equally afraid that if I do, I’ll lose what makes us special.”
She’s right to be worried—but for the wrong reasons.
If you run a $5M professional services firm, you’re not thinking about Google’s moat. You’re thinking: “Will this AI tool help my team or create chaos? Will it make us more efficient or less human? Will it reflect our values or erase them?”
That question — the one keeping you up at night — is actually the same question Big Tech refuses to answer: whose values guide the system?
The difference is, you have something they don’t: clarity about who you serve and why. The crisis isn’t that AI is too complex for small businesses. The crisis is that the story you’ve been told about AI was never written for you.
It was written by those who profit from your confusion.
Let me be clear: AI isn’t the villain in this story. It’s the mirror. It reflects the system that builds it — what we value, what we fear, what we’re willing to ignore for the sake of speed or scale.