A friend who runs a software company called me a few months back. He had just done a postmortem on a project his team had shipped in record time. Beautiful UI. Clean design. Executives loved the demo. Then real users got into it and the whole thing fell apart inside two weeks.
The team had moved fast. They had used AI through every step of the build. They had cut their cycle time from twelve weeks to three.
The postmortem found that the speed had not just shipped the product faster. It had shipped a flawed strategy faster. The architecture decisions nobody had questioned in week one - because there was no time, the AI was generating the code, things were going great - turned out to be what broke under real load.
It is the most important AI lesson of 2026 nobody is putting on a slide deck. AI does not make you better. AI makes you faster. If your strategy is good, you will execute it faster. If your strategy is flawed, you will implement the flawed strategy faster. Speed is only valuable if you are pointed in the right direction.
This is not a "slow down" essay. The owners who slow down right now will get lapped. This is a "checkpoint" essay.
The AI speed-trap
Here is the trap I see leaders walking into.
A year ago, the friction in our work was the protection. The number of hours it took to write a proposal, build a deck, ship a feature, draft a campaign - all of that drag was secretly the place where second thoughts happened. You would write a section, walk away, come back, and realize halfway through draft three that the whole premise was off. The slowness was the safety net.
AI ate the friction. The proposal that took three days now takes thirty minutes. The campaign that took a week now takes an afternoon. The code that took a sprint now takes a coffee break.
But the assumptions are still the same assumptions. The strategic call at the top is still the same call. If the call was wrong, you used to find out four weeks in and lose four weeks. Now you find out four hours in and lose four hours, except you also lost the chance to question the call before you committed to it. You shipped before you thought.
That is what happened to my friend's company. Beautiful UI. Wrong architecture. Shipped fast. Failed faster.
The pre-mortem at decision speed
The fix is not slower work. It is faster checkpoints.
The single highest-leverage practice I have installed at the agency this year is what I would call a pre-mortem at decision speed. Five minutes. Before you commit to a direction. One question.
What would have to be true for this to fail in three months?
That is the whole exercise. You write down three to five answers. You ask whether any of them are likely. You ask which one of them you have not actually thought about. You ask which one of them you would be embarrassed to have missed.
If you walk into the room with the AI-generated draft and you cannot answer those questions in five minutes, you do not ship that draft yet. You go think for an hour.
Five minutes. That is the cost. The cost of skipping it is whatever it cost my friend to relaunch his product.
warning The calls where the speed jumped most - from a week to an hour - are the ones where confidence is most likely to have been overstated. Speed correlates with overconfidence. Look there first. :::
The outside reviewer rule
The other discipline I keep returning to is the outside reviewer rule.
Before any decision your team made fast - faster than they would have made it twelve months ago - one person who was not on the team that built it has to look at it. Not for approval. For a fresh set of eyes.
In our agency, that means I do not let a campaign go out the door if only the people who built it have looked at it. Especially if they used AI to generate it. The reason is not that I do not trust them. The reason is that the speed of generation has compressed their feedback loops. The natural moments where someone else would have weighed in got skipped because the work shipped before they happened.
The outside reviewer rule is the cheapest insurance policy in your business right now. One person. Five minutes. Before it goes out the door. Their only job is to ask, "is there anything obvious that none of you would have caught because you were all in the same flow?"
You will be surprised how often the answer is yes.
The Tuesday afternoon rule
A third practice we have installed. Tuesday afternoon, two o'clock, the leadership team takes thirty minutes and reviews the three biggest decisions made the previous week. Each one gets a 1-to-10 score on two questions.
How confident are we, today, that this was the right call? How much faster did we make the call than we would have a year ago?
The pattern that has emerged is the one I now warn every owner about. The calls where the speed jumped the most - where we used to take a week and now take an hour - are the ones where confidence is most likely to have been overstated.
Speed is correlated with overconfidence. Often enough that you should look.
What this is not
This is not an argument against AI in your decision-making. I am as bullish on AI in my agency as anyone you know. Our content engine produces in a day what used to take a quarter. The leverage is real.
What I am pushing back on is the assumption that because the work is faster, the thinking is also better. The thinking is not automatically better. The thinking is whatever it always was. AI just amplifies it. Amplified clear thinking compounds beautifully. Amplified muddy thinking compounds disastrously.
The agency owner who makes great calls and then ships them ten times faster is going to win the decade. The agency owner who makes mediocre calls and ships them ten times faster is going to learn what bankruptcy looks like at high speed.
The one thing to do this week
Pick the decision your team made fastest in the last seven days. Not the most important. The fastest. The one where, twelve months ago, you would have taken a meeting, slept on it, asked a few people, and then decided. The one that this past week happened in an hour.
Now run the pre-mortem on it retroactively. Five minutes. What would have to be true for this to fail in three months? Write the answers down.
If the answers are clean, congratulations. The speed was real progress.
If any of the answers make you wince, the speed was a warning sign. You skipped a checkpoint. Schedule the conversation now, while you still have time to course-correct.
The 2026 leaders who win are not the ones who said no to AI. They are the ones who said yes to AI and built better checkpoints. They moved fast and stayed pointed. They paid the five-minute cost so they did not pay the four-month one.
What is your one decision this week? Run the five minutes today. Tell one person what you found.
The direction is the work. The speed is just the multiplier.
