Preparing for a customer meeting? Ask AI.
Building a sales forecast? Ask AI.
Presenting a recommendation to the CFO? Ask AI.
We are getting used to having an answer waiting for us. Sometimes before we have spent that much time thinking about the question.
I use AI. I teach colleagues how to use it. I see enormous opportunities to make our work better with it.
But I keep coming back to a question: What are we doing with the time it gives us?
Are we using that time to understand our customers, prepare more carefully, and make better decisions? Or are we filling it with more activity while letting the tool decide what matters?
I believe the people who stand out will be the ones who keep developing their own judgment. People who pause long enough to notice what is happening, question their first interpretation, and take responsibility for what happens next.
Sometimes that starts with opening a notebook.
Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto keeps handwritten notes about opposing hitters and his own observations. In a September 2025 interview with Nikkan Sports, he explained that he also watches video on a tablet, then summarizes what he sees in his own words.
That last part matters to me.
He is taking information available through technology and doing the work of making sense of it himself. The notebook gives him somewhere to record, revisit, and refine his thinking.
Why can’t we bring that same discipline into our daily work?
If you are in sales, take five minutes after a pitch meeting to write down what happened while it is still fresh.
Which question made the customer lean forward? Where did the conversation slow down? Did the finance leader keep returning to implementation costs while you kept talking about features? Who asked about the next step? Who never spoke?
You might remember the handshake at the door, or notice someone checking a phone during the demonstration. Record those observations, but be careful about the story you attach to them. A distracted customer might be uninterested. They might also be dealing with an urgent problem you know nothing about.
“They checked their phone” is an observation. “They don’t care” is an interpretation.
Good judgment includes knowing the difference.
The useful next step is to investigate. Ask a better question. Confirm what matters. Find out whether the meeting addressed the problem they actually need to solve.
Then bring AI into the process.
Give it an accurate account of the questions, objections, commitments, and unresolved issues. Ask it to challenge your reading of the meeting. What other explanations fit? Whose perspective is missing? What would you need to learn before changing your approach?
Those are much better inputs than “Help me close this deal.”
AI can help you find patterns, organize information, and explore a possibility you overlooked. You still have to decide what is credible, what needs checking, and what you are going to do.
The customer relationship still has your name on it.
So does your career.
Whether you are a first-year analyst or a seasoned corporate veteran, you are running You, Inc.
You have assets: your skills, relationships, reputation, experience, and ability to learn. You have obligations: the promises you make and the work other people depend on. You make investments every time you decide where your attention goes.
Who is going to make sure your contributions are understood internally? You are.
Who is going to build relationships across a customer account so one person’s departure doesn’t unravel months of work? You are.
Who is going to prepare for the CFO meeting, understand the numbers, and anticipate the difficult questions? You are.
Other people can help. A good manager can advocate for you. A teammate can open a door. AI can help you prepare. You, Inc. still needs someone actively managing it.
That is where the blue chip idea comes in.
Think about Coca-Cola. Its competitive strength extends beyond the drink itself. The brand, the scale of its business, and the reach of its bottling and distribution system work together to create advantages that are difficult to replicate.
That is a moat: a set of advantages that helps a business defend its ability to create value over time.
A competitor can introduce a new soft drink. Building comparable recognition, customer relationships, and availability is a much larger undertaking.
You, Inc. can build a similar moat around your career.
Your brand is your reputation. When your name comes up in a meeting you aren’t attending, what do people expect? Someone who arrives prepared? Someone who tells the truth when the news is uncomfortable? Someone who follows through?
You build that reputation through what people repeatedly experience when they work with you.
Your distribution is your network: the relationships through which your ideas, contributions, and reputation reach other people. A colleague recommends you for a project. A customer introduces you to another department. A former manager thinks of you when a role opens.
Those connections grow when you help people, share useful work, and stay in touch before you need something.
Scale has a career equivalent, too: the ability to make your knowledge useful beyond the hours you personally put in. You develop a repeatable process. Teach a teammate. Turn a hard-earned lesson into a guide that others can use. Use AI to organize information so you have more time for work that requires your judgment.
You, Inc. gains reach when your expertise helps more people make progress.
Then there is the expertise itself. The knowledge that lets you recognize an incomplete answer, ask the question nobody else thought to ask, and understand why a recommendation that looks good on paper could fail in practice.
These advantages reinforce one another. Your expertise helps you deliver. Delivering builds your reputation. That reputation opens doors to relationships and opportunities where you gain more experience.
The moat is the combination.
Consider a sales meeting. More people can now produce a polished account brief with AI. But someone still has to understand the customer’s business, recognize which objection matters, involve the right people, and keep the promises made in the room.
If you have built credibility with that customer, deep knowledge of the problem, and relationships across the account, you bring something that another person cannot reproduce simply by using the same tool.
That is the career advantage worth developing.
A moat also needs maintenance. Skills get stale. Relationships weaken. Trust erodes when you stop keeping your commitments. A reputation earned five years ago still needs evidence today.
Keep learning. Stay connected. Examine your performance. Adapt your approach when circumstances change.
A strong career moat gives people specific reasons to choose you, and reasons to keep choosing you as the work evolves.
Of course, You, Inc. will have bad quarters. You will lose opportunities, misread situations, and make mistakes. You may work under a poor manager or get caught in a reorganization you could not have prevented.
Taking ownership requires an honest account of those circumstances. It also requires an honest account of your own performance.
Did you prepare as well as you could have? Did you ask for clarity? Did you build the relationships you needed? Did you act on the feedback, or spend three months explaining why it was unfair?
You can acknowledge that something was unfair and still decide what to do next.
That is the high agency response I want to practice. Give yourself room to be disappointed. Then get specific about your next move.
Don’t wait for an annual review to examine the business.
Open the notebook each week. Write down what worked, what went wrong, and what you are avoiding. Include the wins. You need to understand what creates results so you can repeat it.
Choose one adjustment. Make it. Come back the following week and see whether it helped.
That is how experience becomes useful. You carry the lesson into the next meeting instead of simply carrying the frustration.
As AI becomes more capable, I expect more people to arrive at work with impressive material. Better slides. Faster research. Cleaner drafts.
I will still want to know whether the person presenting it understands the problem, can defend the recommendation, and will follow through when the conversation gets difficult.
A blue chip high agency mindset is built in those moments.
Use the tools. Pay attention. Think carefully. Keep your commitments. Adjust when the evidence tells you to.
AI will keep getting better.
Make sure You, Inc. does too.
Sources
Yamamoto notebook example: Nikkan Sports, September 12, 2025 Read source
Coca-Cola business example: The Coca-Cola System Read source
Coca-Cola business example: Growth Strategy Read source
The career moat comparison is the author’s analogy.
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