Better Judgment is The Real Advantage of Being Early to AI
- JD Solomon
- Jul 31
- 3 min read
Being first to a new technology like AI is a short-lived advantage. The tools commoditize, the market catches up, and the edge you worked hard to build quietly disappears. What doesn’t disappear is the pattern recognition that only comes from being wrong early enough that the mistakes were cheap. That’s judgment.
An Early User Made From Necessity
I started using AI seriously in the early 2020s out of necessity. I had just started a small firm that didn’t have the staff to do everything that my old Fortune 500 firms could. I needed tools to help with proofreading and graphics. I needed some extra in-house expertise. And the COVID pandemic compounded everything.
Necessity put me ahead of most people in my field. I joke that while many organizations were learning virtual meetings, I was learning AI. But that didn’t make me an expert. It made me an early user, which is a different thing entirely.
From the Real World
In June 2023, a few months after ChatGPT became a household name, I headlined a panel at the Community of Human and Organizational Learning conference called “The Current State of AI: The Good, Bad, and Evil of ChatGPT.” Most of the room hadn’t touched the tool yet. I had, and I had opinions about where it helped and where it didn’t. That panel felt like being on the leading edge, because at the time, I was.
Being early meant I had no playbook. Every use case — checking a report for tone, testing a framework against a chatbot’s reasoning, drafting supporting visuals — was something I had to figure out myself. It was usually by making a mistake first and correcting for it the next time.
The Tools Caught Up
By 2024, the novelty had worn off and the work had become practical. I was running Grammarly and Canva’s AI features into daily editing and design work, and testing ChatGPT directly against my clients’ technical needs and my own communication tool, the FINESSE Fishbone Diagram®.
Overall, AI met my needs but it did not feel efficient yet.
What Changed Wasn’t My Position — It Was the Job
The article I published earlier this year, “I Caught AI Fabricating Citations,” reads differently than anything I wrote a few years ago. It isn’t excitement about a new capability. It’s a warning built from experience: AI invented a source when it couldn’t find a real one, and I caught it because I knew what to look for. Some things never change.
Being early bought me the scars where AI failed outright or the times I caught AI giving me something that was just wrong. Those scars are worth more now because everyone has access to the same models today and most of my clients and colleagues are using AI. Not everyone has spent five years learning where to distrust what is provided to you.
The professionals who matter most to their clients or their organizations right now aren’t the ones who found AI first. They’re the ones who know when not to trust AI.
Context Matters, Even With AI
The lesson is that an early-user edge was never going to last, but the judgment about when AI helps and when it quietly misleads is a better asset for the long run. Tools commoditize. Judgment compounds.
Are you questioning what you get from AI, or are you still just impressed by it?
JD Solomon is the founder of JD Solomon, Inc., the creator of the FINESSE Fishbone Diagram®, and the co-creator of the SOAP criticality method©. He is the author of Communicating Reliability, Risk & Resiliency to Decision Makers: How to Get Your Boss’s Boss to Understand and Facilitating with FINESSE: A Guide to Successful Business Solutions.
Comments