When I attended MAICON in Cleveland, I was struck by Paul Roetzer's opening keynote. He shared a story that gets to the very heart of our relationship with AI - and it has nothing to do with code.
It's about a single, silent move in a board game.
In 2016, Lee Sedol - the greatest Go player of the past decade - sat across from AlphaGo. Go is a game of profound intuition, a "feel" for the board that experts believed was uniquely human. It's a game of art as much as logic.
And then, on the 37th move, the machine did something no human ever would. It placed a stone in a position so baffling, so wrong, that commentators first called it a bug. A mistake.
But it wasn't a mistake. It was a move of shocking, alien creativity that dismantled Sedol's entire strategy.
He was so stunned he had to physically leave the room to compose himself. Because in that single moment, he felt the floor drop out. He wasn't just losing to a machine; he was facing an intelligence that could see a truth about the game that he couldn't.
Paul calls this a "Move 37" moment. It's that jolt of cold dread and awe when you realize the machine is not just faster, but more creative at the one thing that defines your expertise.
And when you have your "Move 37" moment - not if, but when - it will feel deeply personal.
It might be when an AI writes a piece of copy that's sharper and wittier than yours. Or when it unearths a strategic insight from your own data that you've missed for years. It's that moment you feel your identity as the expert - the one who just knows - start to crack. It's uncomfortably close to that feeling you already know: "My business is capped at my time."
The instinctive reaction is to retreat into the Hero Complex. To fight it. To prove you can still do it all yourself, better than the machine.
That is a losing battle. Lee Sedol didn't win by fighting the machine; he learned from it. His own game became more creative, more powerful, after his encounter with AlphaGo.
This is the only path forward for us, too.
We must stop treating AI like a simple tool and start seeing it as a new class of employee - a digital teammate. A co-pilot. A partner you can train to augment your genius, not replace it.
Imagine a week where your digital teammate handles the deep research that used to eat your Tuesdays. Where it builds the scaffolding of your content - the structure, the data, the draft - and you add the final layer of wit and humanity that only you can. Where you stop being the bottleneck and start being the architect.
You don't need to build the engine. You just need to learn how to drive the car.
This is how we stop collecting random apps and start building a real operating system for our business. This is how we get out of the engine room and back onto the bridge.
I'm curious - have you had your own small "Move 37" moment yet? What's the one genius-level task you'd be most rattled to see an AI do better than you?
You can watch the full AlphaGo Documentary here:
