7-40 Challenge | Round 4, Day 26
I had a conversation today that connected twenty years of my career to the thing everyone’s trying to figure out right now.
I work in data management. I’ve spent two decades as the person who sits between business teams and technical teams, translating what one side needs into language the other side understands. Business people don’t think in tables and queries. Technical people don’t think in revenue targets and customer experience. Somebody has to build the bridge. That’s been my job.
Today I realized that’s exactly what people need to learn to do with AI.
I learned this firsthand when I asked AI to edit my novel. I said “edit this” and got hallucinated rewrites. I said “read this, tell me what’s wrong, don’t touch anything” and got a sharp, tireless reader. Same tool. Same book. The only difference was how clearly I defined what I needed.
That’s not a technology problem. That’s a communication problem. And it’s the same communication problem I solve at my day job every single day.
The people getting great results aren’t smarter. They’re clearer. They define the problem before they ask for a solution. They tell the AI what they know, what they don’t know, and what good looks like. They argue when the output doesn’t match their intent.
They’re doing data architecture for their own thinking — organizing what they know so someone else can work with it. They just don’t know that’s what it’s called.
For twenty years I’ve been building the bridge between people who have information and people who need to use it. The tools on both sides changed today — one side is a person, the other side is a machine. But the problem is identical: get the meaning across, not just the words.
Data is communication. It always was. AI just made it urgent for everyone to learn how to say what they mean.
David Willis 