God, Uber and Me

Hi, and happy Tuesday.

Two weeks ago, Pope Leo XIV became the first American-born pope in history (and yes, he’s from our hometown of Chicago!).

Last week, he published a 42,000 word Magnifico on AI.

The Pope - considered by more than a billion people as a direct line to God - warns that AI is chipping away at what it means to be human, from widening inequality to displacing workers.

The same week, Uber’s COO, Andrew Macdonald, declared that Uber can’t draw a clear line between AI spend and productive output. Apparently, the company managed to incinerate its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months and has nothing to show for it. They didn't just break the bank; they built a bonfire with it.

These stories perfectly capture the current cultural whiplash: AI is either an existential threat to humanity or it's just a massively overhyped corporate money pit.

My take? These sentiments are just two different ways of looking at the same evolution of work - illustrated by one of our own stories

We relaunched our website last month. We've always built and rebuilt our website ourselves - writing, design and building the whole thing, in-house. Our 2022 redesign took a year. This time? Three months.

What changed?

During our 2022 redesign, every round of changes took weeks. With AI, this time it took hours. 

In the past, several of us would labor over each word choice and image. In an effort to go “as fast as possible” - we’d rely on the judgement of just a few people: the senior leaders at the company. As a result, the website never felt in-sync with the view of the wider team members in the company.

This time around, just one of our colleagues - using Google AI Studio and Claude Cowork - rapidly built and rebuilt the entire website in hours. 

The only problem? Everything the AI created was technically "perfect" … but also generic sludge.

But, because it was so fast to build, we could now allocate our time to reviewing the website with numerous colleagues. In all, we did about twenty iterations in those 3 months.

We'd record meetings with our colleagues, let the AI notetaker boil it down to what actually mattered, and incorporate those straight into the next version.  The loop got cheap. And when the loop gets cheap, you can afford more opinions and more tries.

In these review sessions, we’d debate - for example - PreScouter's differentiators.  While the AI initially generated something “optimal,” our commercial team - who actually talk to living humans - could actually tell us what actually resonates with clients.

Even when the work is produced by a machine, though, somebody still has to stand up in a room and defend the machine’s output. Our Marketing Director and I had to reconcile the AI’s output against all the feedback from the reviews and advocate for it. In fact, we probably could have shipped in a month if I hadn't been the bottleneck in the review process.

Which brings us back to the Pope and the burning Uber budget.

These stories are all circling the same truth from different ends. 

• Uber is looking at the balance sheet and missing the ROI because they are still measuring the "building" instead of the quality of iterations. 

• The Pope is looking at the soul, terrified that outsourcing the creation will shrink what it means to be human.

The machine did the work instantly, but it was hollow until our team breathed life into it. Making sense of what the AI has produced, shaping it and advocating for it - that’s the new shape of work.

You can check out our new website at prescouter.com. Let me know if you have thoughts.

Best,

Dino