Stop Trying to Keep Up with AI. Do This Instead.
Nobody sent you an alert when AI got good enough to change your workflow. That's the actual problem.
How Do You Actually Keep Up with AI When It’s Not Your Full-Time Job?
TL;DR: Staying current on AI news is hard enough. But the bigger question for executives isn’t “what happened today in AI” but rather “what can AI do today that it couldn’t do last month, and does that change how my team works?” Solving the first problem requires a curated information diet. Solving the second requires something the industry hasn’t really built yet.
I was in a conversation with an executive last week, and a question came up that I hear some version of almost every time I speak with business leaders. It sounds simple enough: “How do I keep up with all the AI changes?”
But as we talked through it, we realized there were actually two very different questions hiding inside that one.
The First Question: How Do I Filter the Noise?
There’s a new AI announcement every single day. Sometimes five before lunch. A new model drops, a startup raises $200 million, someone posts a demo that goes viral. If you tried to read everything, you’d never do your actual job.
The real skill here isn’t consuming more. It’s filtering better.
I keep up because it’s literally my job. I’ve spent years building a system for it. I listen to AI-focused podcasts every single day, no exceptions. I’ve built curated lists on X (formerly Twitter) of about 40 people who consistently surface the signal before anyone else. I have a small group of close colleagues on a Signal chat where we share and pressure-test the most important developments we’re seeing. And I’ve even built custom AI agents in openclaw that monitor specific news feeds around AI and legal technology, pulling what matters and discarding the rest.
That works for me. But here’s the honest truth: none of that is realistic for a managing partner, a CFO, or a head of operations who has a hundred other things demanding their attention. You shouldn’t need five information channels and custom-built software to know what matters.
What most executives actually need is a single trusted filter. That might be a person on your team who’s genuinely curious about this stuff and good at translating technical news into business implications. It might be a weekly briefing from an advisor or consultant who understands your industry. It might be one well-curated newsletter that does the sorting for you, not the twenty that flood your inbox.
Think about it this way. You don’t read every court filing to stay current on legal trends. You rely on people and publications that tell you which ones matter and why. AI should work the same way.
The Second Question Is the One That Keeps Me Up at Night
Here’s where it gets more interesting, and honestly, harder.
The second question that executive was really asking was: “How do I know when something new in AI suddenly makes a difference for a process I’ve been running the same way for years?”
This isn’t about news. This is about capability awareness. And it’s a fundamentally different problem.
Let me give you an example. Six months ago, if you wanted to analyze a 200-page contract for specific risk provisions, you either needed a junior associate spending three to four hours on it, or you needed an expensive, purpose-built legal tech tool. Today, you can upload that document to several commercially available AI tools and get a solid first-pass analysis in about three minutes. The cost difference is staggering. The time difference changes your workflow entirely.
But here’s the thing: nobody sent you an alert that said, “Hey, this specific capability just crossed the threshold where it’s good enough for your contract review process.” It just... happened. Somewhere between a model update in January and a context window expansion in March, the capability went from “interesting demo” to “genuinely useful for your Tuesday morning.”
That’s the gap. And right now, almost nobody is filling it well.
The industry has plenty of people telling you about new models and benchmarks. What it doesn’t have is a reliable way to connect a specific capability improvement to a specific business process at your firm. That translation layer barely exists. I do this work for clients every day, and I’ll be the first to tell you that even for me, connecting the dots between a new model release and a client’s accounts payable workflow still requires real thought and testing.
What This Means for Your Organization
If you’re a senior leader, the risk isn’t that you’ll miss a big AI announcement. Those are loud. The risk is that a quiet, incremental improvement will make something dramatically better, faster, or cheaper, and you won’t find out for six months because nobody in your organization was watching that specific intersection of technology and process.
The organizations pulling ahead right now aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest AI budgets. They’re the ones who’ve built a habit of regularly asking: “What can we do now that we couldn’t do 90 days ago?”
What to Do Monday Morning
Pick your single best filter for AI news. This could be one newsletter, one podcast, or one person on your team. Stop trying to drink from the firehose. Choose one trusted source and actually read or listen to it consistently.
Appoint a “capability scout.” Identify someone in your organization, it doesn’t need to be an AI expert, who’s naturally curious and operationally minded. Give them explicit permission to spend two to three hours per week exploring what current AI tools can do with real work from your firm.
Run a 90-day capability audit. Every quarter, pick three to five core processes and ask: “If we were starting this process from scratch today with current AI tools, would we design it the same way?” If the answer is no, that’s your opportunity.
Build a feedback loop. When your capability scout finds something interesting, create a lightweight way to test it. A half-day pilot, not a six-month initiative. Speed matters here because the capabilities keep moving.
Accept that you’ll miss things. This is moving fast. No one is catching everything. The goal isn’t perfect awareness. It’s building a system that catches the changes that matter most to your business, even if you miss the ones that don’t.
The Honest Bottom Line
I’ve spent years building my own system for keeping up with AI. Multiple podcasts, curated feeds, peer networks, custom agents. And even with all of that, the second question, knowing when a new capability changes an existing process, is still the hardest part. I’d love a better answer for it. The industry needs one.
Until then, the best move is to stop trying to follow everything and start building a small, consistent habit of testing what’s actually possible right now with your real work. That’s where the value is. Not in knowing what was announced, but in knowing what’s ready.
If you read this far, you’re probably not the person who needs convincing that AI matters. You’re the person trying to figure out what to actually do about it at your firm, with your people, on your timeline.
That’s the conversation I have every day. If you want to have it, steve@intelligencebyintent.com. Tell me what you’re working through. I’ll be honest about what’s ready and what isn’t.
For the daily version of this, smithstephen.com. One article, every morning, for leaders who’d rather test something than read another think piece about the future of work.