I went to the Vermont Solutions Summit in Burlington last week mostly for one session. Neale Lunderville, CEO of VGS and chair of the Governor's AI Economic Task Force, was talking about how Vermont turns AI into an economic advantage.

That is a job I care about. I run technology at a company that builds websites, apps, and marketing systems for contractors across the country. AI is in our workflow every single day. So when the person shaping Vermont's AI strategy gets up to explain how he sees it, I want to hear it.

Most of what he said was good. Some of it was very good. But one idea sat at the center of the talk, and I think it is wrong. And because of who is saying it, I think it is worth pushing on in public.

The story that stuck with me

Neale told a story about an architect. Thanks to AI, this architect can get through the tedious parts of his work faster. The result is that he spends more time at home with his family.

It is a nice story. Everyone in the room liked it. It is the kind of story that makes AI sound humane, and I understand why it is appealing when you are trying to get a state to embrace something that scares a lot of people.

Here is the problem. That is not how it plays out.

The work does not shrink. It multiplies.

I have watched this cycle happen over and over in web development.

When site builders got faster, we did not build the same number of sites and go home early. We built more sites. When frameworks got better, we did not build the same apps with less effort. We built bigger, more complicated apps. When hosting got cheap and automated, we did not run fewer servers. We ran hundreds.

Every gain in speed got reinvested in more output. Not because anyone was greedy, but because the person down the street had the same gain, and standing still meant falling behind.

That architect is not going to keep the same client list and knock off at three o'clock. His competitor has the same tools. She just took on two more projects. Now he has to as well, or he starts losing bids. The time he "got back" gets spent on the next job within a quarter.

This is not cynicism. It is just what happens when a productivity tool becomes universally available.

We all have the same tools

That last point is the one I keep coming back to.

You have access to the same AI I do. So does the contractor across town. So does the guy who started his business last month. So does a firm in Austin, or Raleigh, or Toronto. There is no Vermont version of ChatGPT that is better than everyone else's.

When everyone gets faster at the same time, faster is not an advantage. It is the new floor. And the floor just moved.

That is what makes the "more time with family" framing dangerous. If Vermont's businesses hear the head of the Task Force say the payoff of AI is more free time, some of them will believe it. They will adopt the tools, feel a little relief, and settle in. Meanwhile, every competitor in every other state is using the same tools to do more, bid more, ship more.

We will not lose to AI. We will lose to the people who understood that the bar went up for everyone and got to work clearing it.

What he got right

I want to be fair here, because Neale said something else that matters more than the efficiency story, and it did not get the applause it deserved.

He said the Task Force needs clean data before it can do anything meaningful.

That is the whole game. I have spent a lot of years building CRMs and lead systems, and the number one reason a smart system produces dumb answers is garbage going in. Duplicate records. Empty fields. Three different spellings of the same town. Dates in five formats. AI does not fix any of that. It takes the mess and produces confident, polished, wrong answers at scale.

If the state does the unglamorous work of getting its data clean, current, and open, then Vermont businesses have something real to build on. That is not a commodity. Anyone can buy an AI subscription. Nobody can buy a clean, trustworthy dataset about Vermont's workforce, housing, permitting, or infrastructure. The state either builds that or it does not exist.

That is the part of the talk I wish had been the headline.

What I would tell the Task Force

Three things.

Stop selling time savings. It is not the payoff, and telling people it is sets them up to be blindsided. The honest message is harder but more useful: these tools raise the bar for everyone at once, and the businesses that win will be the ones that understand their own work well enough to use the tools better than the next guy.

Make clean data the first deliverable. Not a strategy document. Not a pilot program. A real, usable, open set of data that Vermont businesses can build on. That is a durable advantage. A subscription is not.

Be honest about what still requires a human. AI generates. It does not understand. Someone still has to know the customer, know the system, and know when the machine is confidently wrong. If the state invests in anything on the workforce side, invest in that kind of understanding. The tools will keep changing. Comprehension does not go out of date.

The real question

The question for Vermont is not how much time AI will save us. Everyone is saving the same time.

The question is whether we can clear the new bar before somebody else does.

I think we can. But not if we are telling ourselves the floor did not move.