🚩Tactical Memo 086: Using AI Won't Get You Promoted

Welcome to Tactical Memo: Tactical advice for managers running teams, projects, and operations in the AI era. Read by 18,000+ leaders at Amazon, Deloitte, and Google. If someone forwarded this to you, join our free community here.

Enrollment for my AI Project Management cohort closes Sunday night. We start Monday morning.

I'll keep this short because you already know everything you need to know.

You know what the course delivers: an AI second brain, working agents, a rebuilt workflow, an automation blueprint, pre-built skills, guardrails, and a 24/7 AI coach.

You know the track record: #1 on Maven, 4.8 across 130+ reviews, 250+ graduates from Microsoft, Amazon, Chevron, Fidelity, Oracle, and Adobe.

So the only thing left is the decision. Join us here.

Two years ago I made myself twice as fast and half as valuable.

AI tools had just landed on my projects. I spent three months rebuilding my workflow around them. Drafts that took a day took an hour. Status decks and project plans, faster than anyone around me.

Then a startup CEO I was advising asked me a question on a renewal call: "I can get the drafts from ChatGPT now. What am I paying you for?"

Fair question. I went back through three months of my own work and saw the answer. I was producing more of the thing that was getting cheaper by the month.

Here is the plain truth I took from that review: promotions go to whoever owns the calls the tools can't make.

Here is what I changed.

1/ Own one call the tool can't make

Every quarter I pick one decision with no clean answer and put my name on it. Last spring it was killing a feature two teams had already built roadmaps around. ChatGPT can argue both sides of that call in ten seconds. It cannot stand in the room while the roadmaps get torn up. I can. That is the line on my record that speed never wrote.

2/ Sign the output, log the errors

When AI drafts anything that ships under my name, I keep a log of what I fixed: the date, the mistake, what it would have cost. In March that log caught a pricing table off by one decimal in a client deck. The client never saw the error. He saw the log. The log says one thing: I am the checkpoint.

3/ Move the saved hours upstream

The tools hand me back about eight hours a week. For a while I filled those hours with more output, which was the whole mistake. Now they go to work that has no draft button: walking a stakeholder through the plan before kickoff, or thirty minutes pressure-testing an estimate with the engineer who gave it. Nobody promotes the person with the most drafts.

4/ Bring verdicts, not summaries

Any client can generate a summary of anything in one prompt, so I stopped sending summaries. Every update I write now ends with a sentence that starts "My call is" and one reason they can push against. Half the time they push. That push is the conversation that gets me hired back. Summaries get skimmed. Verdicts get discussed.

5/ Take the problem with no prompt

Every company has one: the vendor mess, the project nobody will kill. I volunteer for one of those a year. There is no prompt for it because there is no clean input, only people, history, and a decision someone has been avoiding. The person who walks out the other side of that problem gets remembered for two review cycles. The tools never get the credit.

6/ Keep score in decisions

My old weekly recap counted deliverables. My new one counts calls I made and what happened after each one. "Twelve deliverables shipped" reads like a machine. "Recommended we walk away from the renewal, saved the team a wasted quarter" reads like a leader. When a contract comes up for renewal, the second list is what I bring. The first list is what the software did with my help.

Insider Tip: Look at who gets pulled into the room when something goes wrong. That seat belongs to whoever owns the outcome, and the tools cannot sit in it.

Do This Now: Pick one decision this week that has your name on it and no clean answer. Make the call. Write it down.

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Until next time,

Justin Bateh, PhD
Founder and Editor
Tactical Memo