I have spent the better part of the last decade of my career being approached by executives asking me how to optimize or automate away services that I felt had reached a local optimum. Each time this was the case I would gently express that our options were to commodify, by offering a kind of template, the service or optimize the process and way we gathered information from clients. Without fail, they hated the latter option. It was hard to do, and it implied that any number of people needed to do a lot better at their job in seemingly abstract ways. No, they’d always go for the template, then be dissatisfied by the fact that it’s, well, a template! Finally, they’d go back to begging me for alternatives.

This feels like them doubling down yet again. It’s like looking at your personal finances and trying to optimize it by canceling Netflix instead of acknowledging that you eat out 7 days a week.