AI Made Us More Productive, So Why Are We Drowning in Reports?

I spent 30 minutes yesterday running everyone's AI-generated emails and reports back through AI asking for TLDRs.

That's when it clicked. AI was meant to free us up for strategic work. Instead, it gave us the ability to generate more noise, faster - and we took the bait.

The Bloat You Don't See Until It's Everywhere

I used to produce one delivery report covering delivery and incidents. Clean. Consolidated. Done.

Now? Separate reports for delivery, projects, incidents. More detail. More words. Release comms that used to be sharp summaries are now walls of text. PowerPoints balloon with paragraphs that used to be a single sentence.

The AI made it possible to generate all that detail. So we did. And nobody stopped to ask if we should.

The trap isn't that AI doesn't work. It's that it works too well. It enables bloat at scale. The old friction - the effort of writing something properly - acted as a filter. If it wasn't important enough to justify the time, it didn't get made.

Now there's no friction. So everything gets made. And someone still has to read it.

AI should be a filter for thinking, not a replacement for thinking. But we've built loops where AI creates requirements, AI analyses requirements, AI builds against them, and AI reports on everything done by AI. The human brain quietly checks out.

What Happens When No One Owns The Filter

People don't want to read a thousand words every time. But we've built systems that generate a thousand words by default.

So someone becomes the human filter. In this case, me - taking everyone's AI-generated content and throwing it into more AI just to extract signal from noise.

That's not a tooling problem. It's a responsibility problem.

Just because you can generate detailed reports on delivery, projects, and incidents separately doesn't mean you should. The question isn't "what can AI do for us?" It's "what actually matters, and how do we respect people's time?"

That question needs a human answer. Most teams aren't asking it.

The Real Work Is Deciding What Should Exist

In my teams, we run 3 amigos sessions to walk through user experience, technical challenges, and flow. Does it make sense? What do people actually need? Not what's possible to generate - what's necessary to communicate.

With reporting, I actively encourage people to pull things out. Stop doing things. If no one chases you up for something missing, you were probably doing something redundant.

The real metric isn't "how comprehensive is this?" It's "if we stopped producing this, would anyone notice?"

Most of the time, the answer is no.

AI Is a Multiplier - Good or Bad

I'm not anti-AI. I use it daily. It's brilliant when applied with intent.

But AI accelerates whatever direction you're already heading. If you leaned towards over-reporting, over-documenting, and covering arses with process, AI just strapped a turbocharger to it.

The solution isn't better prompts. It's better judgement about what deserves to exist in the first place.

Someone has to consciously ask, before hitting generate: "Do we actually need this?" Someone has to kill reports that aren't valuable anymore. Someone has to push back when a deck blows out to 47 slides because it was easy to add more detail.

That someone is you.

Start Pruning

This week, pick one report, one process, one recurring deliverable.

Ask yourself: if we stopped doing this, who would actually notice?

If the honest answer is "probably nobody," stop. Don't add a validation step. Don't run a survey. Just stop and see what happens.

If no one chases you, you've freed up time for work that actually matters. If someone does, you've learned what's genuinely valuable - and you can bring it back leaner.

AI is a tool. Right now, we're using it to build more noise.

We can do better.

What are you going to stop generating this week?