Lead With CLARITY Issue #15 - THE COMING AI BUBBLE

Peter McLean
Dec 3
6 min read

Issue#15, November 2025

From this issue, I'm changing the name of this newsletter to my "Lead With CLARITY" IP, as it more closely reflects my work. Still "Charting The Course" to help Executive Leaders manage mission and life, as the old header stated, but with more clarity ;)

CLARITY FOR LEADERS: THE COMING AI BUBBLE

A point of clarity leaders need is realising that there is an AI Bubble immanently (not necessarily imminently) presenting itself to the global economy. I'm not talking about financial bubbles, but the impending AI-performance bubble.

Anyone who has extensively used the now ubiquitous language-based AI tools - ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok, Apple Intelligence, etc - knows that there can be an immediate productivity boost. For example, the use of AI in transcription and summary generation is a boon to meetings, discussions and minutes-dispensers everywhere. The near flawless services in this regard provide good value for what is a relatively mundane task.

On that basis, a great many large companies have wholeheartedly adopted the tools and even fired thousands of employees in their delight at being able to substitute human endeavour for not-quite-automated language-based work. This is where the bubble is present. The bubble is the AI-based performance of work occupying the space that would otherwise employ human intellect and/or labour.

Keep using that open service even for transcription over time, however, and you start to see the degradation of that service. Without getting pointlessly technical (I have qualifications in computer programming, language and cognitive development and utilised early and current assistive language technology), the chatbots begin to lose track. They start skipping portions, deliberately occluding segments you want to include, mis-identifying, importing other ideas or past themes, "hallucinating" and more.

Depending on the complexity of task, one finds oneself having to so over-prescribe through prompting or so meticulously reviewing and revising its product, that it was far better to have just written the material oneself in the first place.

This is happening in orders of multitude greater than any of the AI companies want to admit with so-called "vibe coding", text and image generation. Just start to follow some of those critically evaluating AI here on LinkedIn and you'll see the enormous negative impact, if you're not aware of it already.

And recent Australian cases have made global news where the Big Consulting firms have used AI to write $400,000 slop caught out and rejected by government. These big companies have gleefully embraced AI for their main product and are charging clients millions in consulting fees to help them adopt AI tools, when they can't even perform a basic reference check.

Similarly, Australian lawyers have been caught presenting court briefings riddled with errors and hallucinated legal precedents - all generated by the likes of ChatGPT. They were consequently banned from the courts. Those lawyers and their firm's leaders have substituted machine-dependence for autonomous human reasoning. A dangerous and provably calamitous precedent.

And we are seeing more and more researched evidence from multiple disciplines of the negative impact on cognitive and skills performance for those who use extensively rely on these tools - witness writing skills, reasoning skills, argumentation, even doctors' ability to interpret radiological scans.

The AI-performance bubble deflates or pops and then there's nothing left to fill the gap.

Can we use machine learning productively? Absolutely. But that's a different question to the proposals and hype being raised around LLMs and their visual cousins.

So what's the point about leadership?

This: ChatGPT won't build your house, factory or office-building. And I wouldn't trust it in a million years to get the drafting right, no matter how many NVIDIA chips it uses. I'd put my trust in someone I can see and interrogate, who's successfully built before. That kind of human expertise and productive capacity is worth a whole lot more, to my mind.

When the AI-performance bubble bursts, many leaders will be left without those whom they abandoned for the sake of a chatbot, asking - even begging - for those people to return and help. But where will those folks have gone when you turfed them to get affirmed by ChatGPT?

Leaders have to navigate new technologies and environments thoughtfully, intentionally and with a great deal of focus on their mission. As one of my clients said to me recently, when his senior leaders were embroiled in extensive and wasteful vacillation about their computer systems and technologies, he told them, "The clients couldn't care less what computer systems and tech we use. What they care about is that they see that we build great buildings. We need to focus on that."

That's Clarity.

"Lead With CLARITY" Keynotes - Challenging Status Quo

In recent discussion, a client wanted me to challenge the senior leaders in the organisation. It's not the kind of thing where 5 smiley-faces on the feedback sheet are the key outcome one needs. It's the change in attitude and hopefully behaviour.

As the client and colleagues said, "If we even get 25/30% of the people on board, that's a huge win. It can grow from there."

I did - more than that, by far - and it will.

Abraham Lincoln knew it: As he was speaking to everyone and taking a specific position, he knew you can't please all of the people all of the time. Speaking, communicating, with others is not about how they rank what you have to say on their all-time fave list; it's about the impact in the long-run.

PERSONALLY SPEAKING: A TALE OF A FATEFUL TRIP

While in Hobart recently, I was getting tourism advice from one of the young staff members at the hotel reception. He pointed to a boat tour that was a three-hour trip.

"Oh, it's a three-hour cruise!" I instantly crowed. I may have then sung the phrase "A three hour-cruise" from "Gilligan's Island" as I laughingly looked at him to share the joke.

He stared back, with completely blank expression.

"It's like Gilligan's Island. You know: the Skipper, Marianne, a three-hour tour?!" Nothing.

"Okay, this is before your time, I admit, but it was a show, a famous TV show, about Gilligan and a boat cruise that gets lost and ..." and I trailed off in face of the daunting incomprehension in the young man's entire demeanour.

So I turned to the young lady also at the counter. "Do you know Gilligan's Island? There's the professor, Ginger, the millionaire and his wife?" She said, "I have no idea."

I hung my head in abject horror.

"Are you so culturally impoverished? What kind of school education did you have? You never had a media or English teacher tell you about Gilligan?"

The staff, now royally intrigued, offered, "Maybe the Manager out the back knows. She's older." So they went out back to ask the Day Manager, who came out from the back office and said, "No, I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Poor Gilligan," I said, "all alone and forgotten."

I informed them all that they were missing out on a culturally important classic. That it used to show, even in the 1980s, every weekday at 5 pm and everyone would come home from school, get a snack and then watch Gilligan's Island.

The Manager assured me she would schedule a viewing of Gilligan's Island on Friday night, her prime viewing night. Don't worry, I wasn't a frothing maniac they had to appease. They were a little alarmed, perhaps, but at least feigned interest.

But later that night, to my further horror, while walking with my (adult) daughter who was with me, I thought to test her own cultural knowledge. This is a young woman who has Frank Sinatra on the top of her Spotify lists, so surely...

When I asked, "Okay, do you know about Gilligan's Island?" she was equally blank. I felt like a failure.

So, as I'm sure you would also do, I assaulted two random, older, passers-by on the streets of Hobart: "Do you know Gilligan's Island?"

"Oh, of course," responded the gentleman, "The skipper, Gilligan, professor, Marianne".

On further investigation since, I have discovered this massive persistent generational divide.

Forget Gen Z, ABC, triple Omega or whatever - this divide far surpasses them all in meaning and import.

Yes, there are vestiges of civilisation still left in our world. Those strangers demonstrated it. True, those vestiges are dwindling. But I am hopeful. As I had left the hotel, those younger folks had all committed to following up on Gilligan's Island. Even in this small sliver of the world, Gilligan's plight will be reviewed and not forgotten.

It's okay. I'm not obsessing. I mean, my eye starts twitching as soon as you say "Just sit right back..."

Contact me at www.petermcleankeynotes.com/contact to discuss your Keynote, Consulting and Coaching needs.