Most questions can be answered with intent. What's our approach, where are we heading, what does good look like. And people are brilliant at those, they have had years of practice at it. But show me can't be answered with a plan. It needs a screen.
So most people won't have anything. And that's not a character flaw, nobody's ever asked them, and there's never been a slot in the week called trying things.
Then there's a bigger group who show me the same work going faster. The meeting notes they no longer write, emails drafted in half the time, a summary of a document they'd have read anyway. All of it useful. (Somebody will always show you an expensive AI licence being used to summarise a meeting they didn't need to attend. Take the win and move on.)
Your most inventive people are currently a compliance issue
And then a small number show me something that wasn't there before.
They've spotted a point where a customer waits, or repeats themselves, or gets handed on for the third time, and they've closed it with a tool nobody issued them. They're usually a bit sheepish about it. They'll call it a hack. And a fair amount of it isn't strictly within policy, which means your most inventive people are currently a compliance issue.
I've never once found those people in a talent framework. What they have was never on it. We asked for reliability, we wrote it into the job description, paid for the certification, measured it every quarter for thirty years. So we got exactly what we asked for, and now we're calling it a problem.
The most reasonable sentence in the building
But the other half of what this question does is worse, and I don't think we're honest about it.
I've watched capable, senior people go pale in these conversations. And not the ones you'd guess. It's the person who built a career on being the one who knew how to do the thing. Years of being reliably excellent at a defined task, and the task now takes four minutes and comes back better than they'd have done it.
And they won't show me anything. They'll tell me they haven't had a chance to look at it properly yet. Which sounds like the most reasonable sentence in the building.