Everyone’s talking about AI like it’s the pinnacle of intelligence. But the truth is, we haven’t even scratched the surface of human intelligence.
Here’s the thing I keep seeing: institutions collect insane amounts of behavioral data. Clicks, chats, surveys, sentiment. Mountains of it. But almost all of it sits at the surface, like that top 10% of an iceberg. The easy stuff. The part you can measure quickly and visualize in a dashboard. Engagement rate. Response time. Maybe some emotion detection if someone’s feeling fancy.
But underneath that is where the real intelligence lives.
The stuff you can’t immediately see: motivation, personality, emotional friction, values, intent. Why someone actually does or doesn’t do something. That’s the other 90% and we leave it untouched. We don’t build for it, we don’t design for it, and we definitely don’t make decisions around it.
That’s the gap I keep running into.
And it’s not because people don’t care. It’s because that bottom 90% is hard to get to. It’s fuzzy. It's contextual. It’s human. And our current systems aren’t designed to capture or make sense of it.
But here’s my take: if you’re not building for the bottom of the iceberg, you’re not actually building for people. You’re building for outputs. That’s why institutions get blindsided by burnout, disengagement, dropouts, turnover. They didn’t see it coming not because it wasn’t there but because they were looking in the wrong place.
Human intelligence isn’t just about cognition or recall. It’s about pattern, context, emotion, tension, timing. It’s messy. But it’s also where all the leverage is.
So the goal isn’t to replace human intelligence. It’s to build the infrastructure that finally understands it and uses it. That’s what I’m chasing.
Let the bots automate the top 10%. I want to unlock the 90% we’ve been sleeping on.
over.