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Business leaders weigh in.
As tech leaders call for AI slowdowns, many businesses are asking whether they should pause current AI initiatives. But for administrators and operators in the trenches, the answer is increasingly clear: progress thoughtfully, but do not stop. From managing data risk factors to outperforming on LinkedIn, companies using AI say the real danger isn’t moving too fast. It is from moving without structure.
Five business executives and entrepreneurs recently sat down to discuss how AI can move forward despite the calls to slow progress.
Instead of Banning AI Usage, Give It Structure
For Daria Hacker, MBA, the conversation about slowing AI misses the point: the real work is about governance, not speed. Her solution is not to ban AI. It is to build structured, documented processes that make AI a controlled, transparent company tool.
When Hacker began consulting for a Berlin-based jewelry company struggling with high staff turnover, she quickly saw how AI could be both an asset and a liability. While AI tools streamlined workflows, employees using personal accounts for business use were inadvertently feeding sensitive company data into public models.
“If somebody comes to me, some working student, and says they have done it by logging into their personal GPT and feeding all the company data, and here is the table. I just get very nervous,” Hacker says.
In addressing student or employee involvement, she adds, “I actually want them to know what is behind this process, how it’s being done. It’s not just feeding against some [AI] agent and getting the result. They have to be able to explain it.”
Use AI for Repetitive Work, Not Human Engagement
Linkdify founder Tomer Tarsky feels that the AI scare is more media narrative than a real business concern.
“These people, even though they’re competitors with each other, all seem to kind of have the same message at the same time when it comes to coming out with things like this,” Tarsky explained. “And a lot of people speculate that it’s a media stunt.”
He also says he has data showing that AI-saturated outreach is backfiring. As an example, at Linkdify, they tracked a dramatic drop in LinkedIn connection acceptance rates: from 48.6% for requests without notes to just 8.6% when notes are included.
“It’s a 40% difference. People are now assuming that a lot of these connection requests have AI in them, and they just automatically decline,” he adds.
According to Tarsky, what matters is using AI correctly to handle repetitive work while humans focus on authentic engagement that actually converts.
Catch Up to AI, Don’t Slow it Down
One person who doesn’t agree that an AI slowdown is coming is Curtis Serna, Founder and Managing Partner of BeNoticeable, a custom document service and job-matching company based in Canada. Serna sees an acceleration and has built his business around it.
“I think people are drinking from the fire hose today,” Serna noted. “They’re trying to catch up, and these LLMs are moving at such a warp speed. It’s hard to catch up and stay current on everything, but we’ll just keep going and leveraging it to our mutual benefit.”
After ten years working with AI, Serna started Noticeable to solve specific, high-ROI problems. He focused on helping recruiters differentiate candidates, making SMBs discoverable in an AI-agent-driven search landscape and streamlining complex processes. In one success story, Noticeable helped a home builder with a $70k automation project that saved the builder $348,000 annually.
For Serna, the current state of the AI market is not a warning sign; it is an opportunity.
“Our clients are incredibly enthusiastic about the use of this technology,” he shared. “We are literally a four-month-old company. I’m already profitable.”
Don’t Let AI Become a Decision-Maker
SaaS engineer Brian Cheboi of Three Stripes has watched AI evolve from early open-source models to today’s powerful commercial services. He believes the slowdown calls from AI leaders should be attributed to the resource drain of AGI development, the chip and energy costs unique to frontier labs, not to typical businesses.
For most companies automating repetitive tasks, the debate is largely irrelevant.
Cheboi notes, “It’s just stuff like scraping for listings, grabbing images, generating images, changing up the text. For normal day-to-day operations like that, we’ll easily get by.”
The key is keeping AI in a replaceable role rather than letting it become a critical decision-maker.
“When you’re using AI or tools like that, especially if you’re in tech, you never want to give it managerial positions or decision-making positions,” Cheboi added. “If you make AI integral to your workflow, that’s okay. But make sure you don’t give it decision-making capabilities.”
Get Used to Going AI-First
Few people in this article have longer AI credentials than Kevin Surace, who invented one of the first AI virtual assistants in 1997. His conclusion after nearly three decades: slowing AI is not possible in a global competitive environment.
“It is impossible for Altman, Amodai, or any of them, or China, actually to slow the progress down,” Surace stated. “It’s just not going to happen.”
Instead, he feels the focus should be on building the right mindset. He calls it “going AI-First,” by using AI not once a week but five or more times per hour.
Surace adds, “AI is taking away the joyless work, not the joyful work, and people are even more appreciated for the differences they bring: taste and experience and judgment.”
He believes that organizations that make that shift will see a tenfold increase in productivity while freeing their people from tedious tasks.
The Future of AI Remains Open
In response to calls for AI slowdowns, these business leaders contend that companies should focus on structured AI use rather than pausing progress. Across industries, they emphasize that the risk lies in unguided adoption, not in moving too quickly. By controlling AI and using it strictly for repetitive operational tasks, while keeping humans in the loop for strategy and judgment, organizations can use AI to their advantage.
