Blair Enns published something recently that I've been thinking about a lot.

It's a disclosure scale for AI use in written work, essentially it's a way of signalling just how much of a piece was written by a human versus generated by a machine. AI-0 means no AI whatsoever. AI-5 means the machine wrote essentially all of it and a human just tidied the edges.

Obviously it's good to have a sense of 'scale' for these things, but what I find more interesting is why it needs to exist at all.

We've reached a point where we even have to question "did a human write this?"... which is actually quite mad if you think about it. Turing Test be damned.

That's a strange place to have arrived. And I think it changes what's valuable in a way that most businesses haven't fully really grasped or understood.

The efficiency fallacy

I see a load of businesses churning out this sort of crap;

"We use AI to do more, faster, cheaper."

"We automate our content."

"We automate our outreach and automate our diagnostics."

"We can cut the overhead and get praised for the savings."

And for a lot of tasks, that's honestly probably the right call. I use AI constantly, it's amazing useful for research, production tasks that used to take hours, plenty of things. I'm usually a pretty poor speller when I write, AI is fab for that sort of work.

But there's a category of work where the efficiency logic breaks down, where the human element isn't a cost to be optimised, it's the product itself.

I see a lot of businesses right now positioning AI as a differentiator. "We're AI-powered." "AI-first." "We use the latest tools to serve you faster." And I understand the instinct, it sounds modern right? It sounds efficient and forward-thinking...

BUT here's the thing I've noticed. Not a single one of my clients has ever even mentioned AI to me. They simply do not care if I use AI. They want to know who they can speak to when they're lost, if they need help with something or have ideas they want to stress test.

This is the most important thing, the relationship. The judgment you as an expert have. It's the conversation that takes an unexpected turn and produces something neither party could have predicted.

That's not automatable. And it's becoming more valuable precisely because so much else is.

We just finished a rebrand and website for FGC, Rory Forrest's legal consultancy, formerly known as Fraction GC.

The process involved a lot of the work that doesn't show up in the case study. Those conversations about what BUILD and EMBED (the two core parts of how FGC describes what it does) actually meant to his clients, not just internally. Getting to the language that was genuinely theirs rather than the language they'd defaulted to because it felt professional.

When Rory saw the finished brand, he said:

"FGC finally feels like us. The new website is the first one I've actually wanted to send people to. I'm genuinely proud of it."

That feeling, that sense of 'pride' doesn't come from a bloody AI tool. It comes from being properly understood and from someone taking the time to get to the truth of what you're doing and why, and then building something that reflects it back accurately.

You can't shortcut that. The conversation is the work.

Where the advantage actually is

What I love about this AI Contribution Scale isn't so much an argument against AI, but more of an argument for transparency.

I genuinely believe that the businesses that will stand out over the next few years aren't the ones that automate everything. They're the ones that stay ruthlessly human where it matters.

For us that means the Demand Tension Workshop stays a conversation, not a questionnaire. The strategy work stays founder-led. The things that require judgment and relationship stay human. The production work gets as efficient as it can be.

In a world of AI, be ruthlessly human.