AI Is the Best Method Ever Built. It Still Can’t Create the Effect.
Audiences feel the effect, never the method. As AI absorbs the method, the human effect is what sets your company apart.
When people come up to me after a show, they almost never ask how a trick works. They tell me how it made them feel. Twenty-five years on stage has taught me the same lesson over and over: the audience never experiences the method. They only experience the effect.
I was reading Natalie Nixon’s essay in Fast Company this week, “Creativity is currency.” She argues we have moved past the Information Age into what she calls the Imagination Era, a time when ideas and the ability to make people feel something become the real currency. She describes AI as the new medium for the work we do, while awe, that human spark of curiosity and connection, stays ours alone. Reading it, I kept thinking about method and effect.
AI is a method. The most capable method ever built. It can draft, structure, summarize, and generate faster than any person alive. Most leaders I talk to are busy assembling a stack of these tools, and that work matters. But your customer never experiences your method. Neither does your team, and neither does your board. They experience the effect: what it felt like to deal with you, to sit across from you, to be seen by your company. As AI absorbs more of the method, the effect becomes the one thing that separates you from everyone holding the same tools.
I still get nervous before every show. The nerves have never been about the method. I know the method cold. What I cannot fully control is how it will feel for the people in front of me, and that is the only part that counts.
This is the idea I keep coming back to when I work with leadership teams, and the heart of my keynote: the audience judges the effect, not the method. A magician can run a flawless method and produce a forgettable effect. A company can own the most advanced AI stack in its industry and still leave customers cold.
Nixon’s word for the human part is awe. I have written before about why those moments matter, the second someone sets down their phone and gives you their full attention, and why the moments people remember are the ones you design on purpose. Machines are very good at output. They are not the source of that feeling. You are.
Try this with your team this week. Stop asking which AI tools everyone is using. Ask a different question instead: what do we want people to feel after working with us? Then look at every tool and decide whether it serves that feeling or replaces it.
AI is the best method ever built. It still cannot produce the effect. That part has always been yours.
