Jorge Arango
Information architect and consultant who has spent three decades helping organizations, from non-profits to Fortune 500 companies, make digital systems easier t...
“When I hear automation, like I'm thinking, you know, look, let's do the thing that we were doing before… It's about doing the same thing that I was doing before, but doing it faster, doing it more cheaply with lower energy or what have you. And that is probably the most boring use of this technology.”
Traction Heroes · User Experience · October 2026
Arango is discussing a book on what organizations should do with AI, which contrasts "automating" (replacing human labor) with "informating" (giving people new abilities). He argues the first wave of AI applications has been almost entirely about efficiency, and that the real question is what becomes possible with cheap cognition.
Transcript
…It's almost like let's put the technology forward and then see what happens, as opposed to let's be really mindful here and think about what the technology might make possible for us. So, that was that's kind of my opening salvo here, and I'm wondering if you have thoughts about that.
…them. But innovating against the incredible unfurling of possibilities as we contact the real world is, there is no best version of that. And even the practices themselves have such high variance, it's hard to know which ones ought to get our attention. And those are not easily automated. Well,
…gaining efficiencies. And that, you know, when I hear automation, like I'm thinking, you know, look, let's do the thing that we were doing before. Like you said, it's like, you know, I've done it three times by hand. It's like, I don't need to be doing the same thing three times by hand. Let me whip up a little batch script or something that will do it for me. That's about efficiencies, right? It's about doing the same thing that I was doing before, but doing it faster, doing it more cheaply with lower energy or what have you. And that is probably the most boring use of this technology. You know, the real question here is: now that we have something like relatively inexpensive cognition, what new possibilities open up? And I'll give you another one. Now that we have the ability to make things, software things especially, faster and cheaper than before, what are we going to make? These are not technology questions, these are strategy questions. And it might be that AI can help…
I agree with you. In fact, I'm working on a number of AI projects right now. And one of them is with a world-class, interestingly, with a world-class bookstore. And we're looking at the application of artificial intelligence and new technologies to the sort of the next generation of the bookstore…
I'm going to say something good about that approach before I tear it down. I think that the good thing about that approach is that by focusing on efficiencies to free up time for use blue sky thinking, I'm going to reframe it in the terms I used to really think about where we're going, right? Like…
Yeah.