Be More Ambitious
Why we should use AI to rethink how work gets done, not just automate pieces of it.
In my previous post, I wrote about taking more risks. There is a related question I keep coming back to: what are we willing to take those risks for?
We need to be more ambitious.
That has become personal for me. When my mother was in the hospital, I was trying to understand complex medical information while living through something incredibly difficult. Questions kept coming, and I could not always get an explanation at the moment I needed one. That experience changed how I think about access to knowledge. Being able to understand what is happening, ask better questions, and have a more informed conversation with a doctor can matter enormously to a family.
It is why the possibility of AI contributing to medicine feels so consequential to me. Better explanations are valuable. The larger ambition is to help people get better care and to advance what medicine can do.
I bring that same question to other parts of my life: what could this technology make possible if I were willing to rethink how I approach the problem?
The ambition gap
I see people building websites, automating individual tasks, and adding AI to familiar workflows. Those are useful things to do. What concerns me is when they become the full extent of our imagination.
In conversations with partners and colleagues, I have often seen AI scoped to a small part of a much larger operation. Classify a document. Summarize a case. Route a request.
Each of those can improve a process. But we too often accept the process itself as fixed.
What would we build if we could reconsider how the work happens from beginning to end? Which handoffs would disappear? Which decisions could happen sooner? What could we offer customers that our current organization makes too expensive or too slow?
The potential for AI to contribute to scientific discovery should push us to ask bigger questions about our own work. When I read Dario Amodei’s vision for advances in biology and medicine, I think about what those possibilities could mean for people facing the uncertainty my family experienced.
That is the scale of impact to keep in mind, even when the first step is small.
Rethinking my own approach
I could have continued managing my investments the way I always had: searching Google, watching videos, researching individual ideas, and trying to put everything together on my own.
I could also have added an AI assistant to that routine and asked it to summarize what I found. That would have been useful. But I wanted to explore something more ambitious.
One idea I am working on is a trading desk built around multiple AI agents.
The design brings together research, strategy implementation, trade execution, and risk analysis. I want an operation that can investigate an opportunity, challenge its assumptions, evaluate its risks, and act within defined limits, with me responsible for its direction and decisions.
I am still building and testing that idea. The ambition does not establish that the research is reliable or that the trades will be profitable. Those things have to be demonstrated.
What has already changed is the scope of what I am willing to attempt and learn. I can explore an operating model that would previously have required a much larger team. I have to think about how research becomes a decision, how that decision is challenged, and how risk is controlled across the entire operation.
That is a much bigger undertaking than finding a faster way to read an article. It is also a much more interesting one.
Leadership has to commit
My trading desk idea depends on my willingness to change how I work. Inside an organization, that willingness has to come from leadership too.
I hear organizations say they want to lead in AI. The real test is whether their leaders are prepared to change how the business operates.
Are they willing to reconsider responsibilities, approvals, and handoffs? Will they give people the authority to test a different approach? Will they stay involved when the work becomes harder than a compelling demo?
A CEO can announce an AI strategy. Making that strategy consequential requires decisions about resources, accountability, and which familiar ways of working the organization is willing to reconsider.
If every existing process must remain intact, we have already limited what the technology can achieve.
Aim at an outcome that matters
We are spending real money on AI. We should expect real returns.
A small automation can be the right investment. A larger transformation can fail expensively. Ambition needs evidence, and the scale of a project alone tells us very little about its value.
But I do not want the boundaries of an existing process to decide the size of the opportunity before we have even explored it.
Start with the outcome. Could we make a service accessible to people who cannot afford it today? Help someone reach an informed decision sooner? Deliver better quality? Build a capability that was previously out of reach?
Then measure whether the new approach actually works. Include the cost of integration, supervision, and correcting mistakes. Define who has authority and who is accountable for the result.
Start with a bounded experiment. Use it to test a larger possibility.
Take the opportunity seriously
Our conversation about AI needs room for both risk and opportunity. We can take concerns about powerful systems seriously while being ambitious about what we build with the capabilities available today.
My experiences have made me more interested in what AI could change in someone’s life. Understanding a difficult situation. Learning enough to pursue an idea that once felt beyond reach. Getting access to expertise when it matters.
That is the standard I want to bring to my own projects and to conversations about business transformation.
For leaders, it means choosing a meaningful goal and committing to the changes required to pursue it. For builders, it means asking how far the idea could go and what evidence would justify the next step.
Taking more risks opens the door.
Being more ambitious gives us a reason to walk through it.