John Brandon Elam published an article, “Define Your Term or Stop Using Them” with the subtitle “Why the smartest-sounding people in the room are often contributing the least.”

The fundamental unit of business value isn’t data. It isn’t AI. It isn’t any specific technology. It’s the decision. Everything else is infrastructure in service of making better decisions more consistently. But here’s the thing: if you can’t define the terms you’re using, you can’t define the decisions you’re trying to improve. And if you can’t define the decisions, you’re not optimizing anything. You’re just adding complexity and calling it progress. Link

I’ve been running an informal experiment for years. When someone uses a buzzword confidently, I ask them to define it. Not to embarrass them. Not as a gotcha. I just want to see what happens when someone has to turn a familiar noise into a clear thought. John lists “Big Data”, “Digital Transformation”, and the current “AI Agents” as examples.

When someone says “we need an agentic AI solution” in a meeting, the meeting just continues. The vague language goes unchallenged. The decision gets made on vibes dressed up as strategy… In professional settings, form without function can succeed for years because the feedback loop is broken or nonexistent.

The 95% use LLMs to generate text they can’t evaluate. They paste the output, skim it, and ship it. If it sounds right, it must be right. They’re using the tool the same way they use buzzwords: performing competence without verifying it.

The 1% use the same tool and get radically different results. Because they understand the domain, they can evaluate what the AI produces. They can spot where it’s wrong. They can take a good-but-incomplete output and connect it to adjacent concepts in ways the tool never would have on its own. They’re not just copying. They’re composing. The AI output becomes raw material that they can shape, extend, and combine because they understand the underlying system well enough to see connections that aren’t obvious on the surface.