Harry and I have been helping businesses think about how to best use AI. As you’d expect, we bring a strategic focus to this work. Which is why in episode 47 of Traction Heroes, I read a fragment from Stefanie Hutka’s new book, What Your Machines Should Do.
Stephanie describes the breakneck pace of AI developments, and notes:
Beneath this momentum is a rarely examined assumption. Human thinking is a process that can be separated from the thinker and reproduced by a machine. If that assumption is true, then full automation is just an engineering problem on a timeline. If it isn’t (decades of cognitive neuroscience research suggest it isn’t), then the destination of ‘automate everything’ needs rethinking.
AI’s momentum is also no longer confined to software or knowledge work. It’s rapidly taking physical form. Stroll down any street in San Francisco, and there’s a good chance you’ll see more than one autonomous vehicle shuttling its passengers to their destination. Companies like Figure AI, valued at forty billion dollars in 2025, are designing humanoid robots for both industrial and domestic tasks. At the same time, Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs is building “spatial intelligence,” the capacity for AI systems to perceive and interact with the three-dimensional world, much like LLMs interpret and generate text. Meanwhile, companies such as ElliQ creating AI companions to support aging populations.
These advances make fully autonomous systems feel not just possible but inevitable for technology companies. If you’re not building agentic workflows or humanoid robots toward this end goal, you clearly haven’t gotten the memo. Under this pressure, “automate everything” often becomes the organization’s focal point rather than one of many possible ways to execute on strategy. This is how market pressures to automate can crystallize into a reactive vision of a fully automated future.
The book proposes alternatives to this reactive vision. The key is being more intentional with technology.
Hutka cites Shoshana Zuboff’s distinction between automating and informating. The former entails using technology to replace people for the sake of greater efficiency and control. Conversely, the latter is about using technology to make the business’s underlying processes visible so people can better control them. As Hutka puts it, “If automating attempts to turn humans into robots, informating attempts to turn humans into superhumans.”
You can guess which side I’m on. That’s why I wanted to discuss it on the show, even though the book won’t ship for a few more weeks. But you can preorder it now, and I recommend you get it — it covers a relevant and urgent topic. (BTW, if you want a deeper dive, check out my conversation with Stef and Greg Petroff about the book.)