AI Is Ready. But This Step Is One a Lot of People Haven't Thought Through

Gartner put out a report last week: by 2027, four out of ten AI agent projects will be cancelled by their companies. The number itself isn't all that surprising, but another one makes you pause: among the projects that haven't been cut, 89% never actually went live in the first place. They never even got started. Gartner's explanation is pretty direct: the AI technology isn't the problem. The task boundaries weren't drawn clearly, and the background context wasn't spelled out fully enough. The tools were bought, the people were lined up, but no one could say "what exactly is this AI supposed to do, and where is the point where it's considered done?" The order to march was never given, so the whole army just stood there. GitHub Copilot's hiring approach got shared recently, and one detail is worth a look: when they interview engineers, they still require them to write code by hand. The company's core product is a tool that has AI write code for you, yet the interview tests exactly that skill. What they want to see is whether, with no AI tools at all, you can think through the design of a problem clearly from the first step. In their words, AI is an amplifier of taste: the clearer you are about what you want, the faster AI helps you get it; the vaguer you are, the faster it helps you produce something vague. AI's capability is now good enough. There are more and more tasks it can handle. Where things get stuck is whether a person can first say clearly "what I want, and what it looks like when it's done." This skill didn't used to need saying out loud. A lot of work ran on following the people who came before you, on knowing when you felt it. Defining the problem was hidden inside the process and never had to be spoken. Now it does. You have to tell the AI, and you also have to tell yourself, saying it out loud once before you start. This skill has nothing to do with your degree or your technical background, but it takes practice. That thing you had AI do for you today, how many sentences did you say beforehand to describe the result you wanted?