Summary: In this article I explore why most people use AI backwards, outsourcing the journey when they should protect it, costing themselves growth and originality.
4 things you’ll learn in this article
- The difference between telic and atelic tasks, and why confusing the two is quietly sabotaging your growth.
- Why the only tasks worth handing to AI are the ones where the result is all that matters, and how to spot them.
- The reason journaling, art, writing and even your KPI spreadsheet should never touch an AI, even though they easily could.
- Why the businesses that win the AI era will be the ones deliberately choosing to do things that refuse to scale.
Every week, I spend hours and hours speaking one-on-one with the business owners I mentor. And increasingly, AI is becoming the main topic of conversation. And rightly so. The impact of chat or agentic-based large language models like ChatGPT and Claude has been nothing short of revolutionary.
But there’s a common thread that runs through many of these conversations, and my read on the current use of AI is that most people have got it all backwards. They’re outsourcing to AI the things they should be doing themselves, and they’re doing themselves all the things that should be delegated to AI.
It strikes me that that the stuff that should be handed over to an AI is the stuff where the purpose of that task is producing an output. The purpose of that task is in producing an end result. Where the process is not important. These tasks are called ‘telic tasks’. Telic tasks are the things that have a goal, a purpose, and a clear endpoint. They are done with the intent of achieving some specific outcome.
A lot of knowledge work is shifting to output based pricing, where people pay based on the delivery of work, regardless of the number of person-hours that have gone into it. And rightly so. Billable hourly rates are becoming a less appropriate pricing strategy in an economy where we can put a team of AI agents to work for a couple of hundred dollars a month.
So yes, outsource these ‘telic’ tasks to AI.
Contrast these with ‘atelic’ tasks, things that have no endpoint or purpose (other than the activity itself).
‘Telic’ and ‘Atelic’ tasks are related to what the author Professor James P. Carse calls ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’ games.
He defines finite games as a game that is ‘…played for the purpose of winning (where) the rules of a finite game are the contractual terms by which the players can agree who has won. The rules are like the boundaries of the game, and by extension, like the boundaries of the players, giving definition to who they are within the game.’
Infinite games however are ‘…played for the purpose of continuing the play. The rules of an infinite game must change during the course of play. The rules of an infinite game are changed to prevent anyone from winning the game and to bring as many persons as possible into the play.’
Think about going for a walk along the beach. The purpose isn’t to get to the end before someone else. The purpose isn’t to get to the end of the beach at all. There is no purpose beyond the pure act of walking on a beach. The purpose of walking on the beach is to walk on the beach. This is an atelic task.
Atelic tasks are those things where the purpose is not the output, the purpose is the input. The purpose is not having something to show for it at the end. The purpose is not the destination. The purpose is the journey. The mistake that I see a lot of people making is they are outsourcing the journey to AI.
Let me give you a personal example. When my mind gets cluttered and overwhelmed, one of the most effective decluttering techniques I use is to write down my thoughts. By getting my jumble of problems and ideas onto paper, they seem to order themselves. But it’s not about having these ideas on paper, it’s about the act of getting them on paper. It’s not about having a list of things, it’s about the mental processes I went through to get that list of things.
So it wouldn’t make sense to me to outsource journaling to an AI, to a robot. Because if I’m outsourcing journaling to a robot, I’m missing the whole point. I’m outsourcing an input, not an output.
It’s the same with art. Yes, AI can generate art which is indistinguishable from art created by humans However, in my mind, the purpose of art is not the presentation of art, but the creation of art. I would say that for a true artist, art is less about exhibiting their work and more about creating their work. Think of a consumer who doesn’t know who or what created art, be it a song or a movie or a painting or any other media. For them, this art may be equally compelling and moving whether it was human or AI generated. But for the actual artist, it’s not the consumption or the exhibition of the final art that is important. It is the act of creation of the art.
Ok, so let’s get a bit more tangible here. What are a few things that I think you should never outsource to AI in business.
For me personally, I won’t get AI to do anything where I’m trying to spread unique ideas from my unique brain in my unique voice.
This article for example. It hasn’t had any AI input. And that’s because, for me, the act of writing the article is as important as the output of the article. As I sit here writing this, I’m getting my own thoughts in order, and I’m creating neural connections that I’ll be able to build on in the future as the launchpad for more original thinking. Getting AI to write an article for me will deprive me of all that. As it stands currently, large language models are prediction machines, and they generate content based on the data they’re trained on. By definition, the output of that cannot be original, as it’s just a different version of what already exists. The content will just regress to the mean. And I don’t want that, I want to be original.
I also strongly believe that you shouldn’t outsource the time you should be spending each month on updating your KPIs. It would be very easy for me to create a scheduled agentic workflow in Claude Cowork that scrapes my calendar, my accounting software, and my time tracking system, and spits out the results in my KPI spreadsheet. But for me, the point of my KPI spreadsheet isn’t to have a completed sheet, it’s the work I need to do to find the answers and the data to manual insert into each cell. Because by doing that, I’m developing an intimate understanding of my business. I’m not just arriving at an output, I uncovering how we arrived at that output.
Perhaps my biggest focus at the moment since I launched Gobsmack Consulting (my customer experience design consultancy) is in designing unscaleable experiences.
AI is basically a technology that allows for near infinite systemisation and near infinite scalability. Everything that was expensive, difficult or time consuming is becoming cheap, easy, and instantaneous.
With a mass global embrace of AI, the playing field will be instantly levelled. While the early days of the technology saw the use of AI as a competitive advantage, as the technology becomes mainstream, businesses will need to find something new to make them stand out.
Everyone is looking for automation in their business. This is what AI promises. People are going to crave things that do not scale. This is what we need to provide. With everyone using AI as a system to commoditise the customer experience of their business, the businesses that win will be the ones who choose to do the things that won’t scale. The messy, time consuming things that only a human can do. In a world that is becoming less and less human, reintroducing the humanity that people are aching for will become the biggest competitive advantage for business.
And I think this question of what to outsource extends far beyond business, and bleeds across into life.
There’s a strong human drive towards growth. If we outsource the atelic tasks where the journey is the whole purpose, then we’re missing out on the journey, we’re missing out on personal growth, we’re missing out on problem-solving, we’re missing out on struggle, and those are all important parts of the human condition.
They’re all important parts of what it means to live a full and good life. So we should outsource things where the output is the purpose, and we should aggressively protect those things where the input is the purpose, where the purpose is the journey, not the destination, where the purpose is the work, not the exhibition.
Your action steps:
- Sort your regular tasks into telic (only the output matters) and atelic (the doing itself matters).
- Hand your telic tasks, the ones where only the end result counts, over to AI.
- Protect your atelic work like journaling, writing and thinking by keeping it fully human.
- Do your KPIs manually each month so you build a real understanding of your own numbers.
- Choose one deliberately unscaleable, human experience to offer your customers this quarter.
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