Your prompt engineering obsession is the problem, not the solution.
I spoke at Miro’s Canvas event yesterday about AI disruption and thriving through it! Their tagline really resonated with me: “The Canvas is the Prompt.”
Because it exposes what everyone’s doing wrong.
Walk into any company right now and you’ll see the same thing: people hunched over text boxes, crafting the perfect prompt. Iterating. Refining. Engineering precision.
They think they’re mastering AI. They’re actually missing the point entirely.
Prompts give instructions. Canvas gives context.
Here’s what nobody’s telling you: AI doesn’t need better instructions. It needs better context. And context can’t be compressed into a sentence. It needs space. Relationships. Patterns. The messy reality of how ideas actually connect.
The executives struggling most with AI are trying to prompt their way to answers. But the ones winning? They’re building context. They’re putting everything on the canvas so AI can see what they see, notice what they missed, and reveal what they couldn’t have prompted for.
This is the shift from control to clarity. From “tell the AI exactly what to do” to “show the AI what you’re actually navigating.”
Your strategic planning brain wants to reduce everything to a clear instruction. But uncertainty doesn’t work that way. You can’t prompt your way through disruption. You need context-rich thinking, not instruction-perfect prompting.
The uncomfortable truth? Your competitors aren’t optimising prompts. They’re capturing context. And while you’re perfecting your input, they’re already seeing possibilities you haven’t even recognised yet.
Are you still trying to control AI with better prompts, or are you ready to give it the context it actually needs?
#aiready #aichange
This week I spoke at Spark Accelerate in Auckland about a topic that’s keeping a lot of smart people awake at night:
How do we thrive in an uncertain world without letting AI slowly rot our brains?
We walked through what the next two decades of AI change are likely to do to:
How we think
How we work
How we learn and make decisions
My core message:
AI isn’t just an efficiency tool. It’s a pressure test for human intelligence.
If we over-outsource our thinking, without practising cognitive upsizing, we get AI brain rot, cognitive complacency, atrophy... enfeeblement.
It was energising to see a room full of leaders in Auckland willing to confront both the upside and the psychological risks of this technology, instead of defaulting to either hype or doom. @sparknz@amandaj0hnstone@gregshove
The development of AI has brought humanity to the cusp of a seismic change the likes of which has never been seen before. Join neuro-futurist, Joel Pearson, and coach and transformation expert, Barbara Wilby to examine how we can use AI to amplify human strengths and lead through uncertainty.
🗓️ Tue 2 Jun, 6.30pm
📍Leighton Hall, UNSW Sydney
🎟️ Tickets at the link in bio
