The Charts Don't Matter, and They Never Did

Why AI Is Turning Business Docs Into Prompts

They way we have been working for decades was focused far too much on documents. Decks, memos, spreadsheets, briefs, business cases—hundreds of hours crafting documents not because the documents mattered, but because they signaled that we were thinking.

Here's the reality that AI is exposing: the documents were never the point. They were artifacts of thought. What really mattered was the thinking itself, and how that thinking was conveyed to people who make decisions. We should never build decks for the deck’s sake; we build them for the story, and we built them assuming a person would read them.

That is changing now, with AI doing a growing portion of the work. AI is already 'reading' and 'writing' far more than we are. The artifacts have become the prompts.

Documents as Fossils

Think about it:

• We write strategy memos to distill our logic.

• We build financial models to stress-test our hypotheses.

• We assemble slide decks to persuade.

But what matters isn’t the PDF. It’s the clarity of insight, the sharpness of reasoning, and the ability to drive action. The best presentations move people, not because of the font or color scheme, but because someone knew exactly what point they were making and how to make it land. And, making these by hand (a lot of hands) and reviewing them by reading them all is not the future.

Enter AI: From Artifacts to Inputs

In a world where AI is now co-creator, co-writer, co-analyst, those old artifacts get redefined. Your job is no longer to build the thing, but to direct the thinking. You prompt it. You shape the intent. You judge the output. You curate the narrative. You go from authoring artifacts to architecting thought.

Prompts replace slides. Guidance replaces formatting. Clarity of intent becomes the new superpower. AI is really good at the words, phrasing, and interpreting all of this content. We need to be really good at managing AI to do the work.

So What Now?

If you're still obsessing over deck polish or memo formatting, you're optimizing for yesterday. The new value curve is:

• Do you know what decision you’re driving?

• Can you express it with precision to a machine through prompting?

• Can you refine the AI output until it nails the point you want to make?

• Can you make the final results really land for a human?

AI doesn’t care about your charts. And ironically, neither did the people. They cared about what it meant. They always have. And now that AI is creating and reviewing content, that’s the only thing that matters. AI does the document work and we make the decisions that matter most. Design everything for the decision makers.

Final Thought: If your job was to build the artifact, AI’s going to change everything for you. If your job was to make the big decisions, you just became more important than ever.

The charts don’t matter. They never did. But the story? That’s eternal.