Many in the community, however, have succumbed to looking away from self sustainability, becoming dependent on seeking government grants and falling for the counterintuitiveness of non-profit organizations telling them how to make profit. 

So while chatting things up at the event, I mentioned my company, 6ai Technologies, saying we are in “AI.” So the discussion moved to technology: comparing us to ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Claude (Anthropic).

I mentioned 6ai’s applied intelligence-IP is the “opposite” of those large language model (LLM) types. 

Never one to shy away from the smoke, I added that OpenAI and Anthropic are basically throwing as much smoke and mirrors as necessary at the public and the uninformed media, fooling them into believing that their model is the inevitable future.

Now the conversation was heating up. I went for more smoke, saying that applied intelligence (ai) was the “real ai!” Unlike LLM-based AI, 6ai is not out to create chatbot dependency to bolster a fragile business model, mainly running on hype right now.

6ai is human-centric, I said. 

AI automates, whereas we develop thinkers, create individual decisioning systems, powered by our user's own curiosity—to question and augment their independent thought. Using a structured, Socratic method of inquiry, 6ai brings thinking back, helping users to think, challenge assumptions, which promotes self-derived conclusions.  

So we are the antithesis of the LLM models like ChatGPT.  

The Age Of Trendslop: Business Leaders Are Using AI To Say Everything And Nothing All At Once 

A piece of research from Harvard Business Review (HBR), published in March 2026, titled, Researchers Asked LLMs for Strategic Advice. They Got “Trendslop” in Return, reveals the objective truth about LLM technology. 

Harvard: “leaders” are basically getting fooled, believing that AI can deliver authentic, real-world strategy for their organizations. 

They “assume that LLMs are able to offer a kind of unbiased, outside perspective,” but the “leading LLMs have clear biases when it comes to strategy and consistently recommend strategies that align with modern managerial buzzwords and trends rather than context-specific strategic logic”. 

“Leaders and consultants are increasingly turning to large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT as silent partners in the boardroom. These tools promise to summarize complex information, produce clear arguments, and offer polished strategic recommendations in seconds.” 

But the only thing is, they don’t! 

“LLMs can’t get integrated into executive workflows” They do not produce any useful strategies leaders can actually use, what it produces, instead, according to Harvard, is “not trustworthy”. 

The researchers also found that AI had a propensity to opt for “buzzy ideas over reasoned solutions,” which Harvard called “trendslop." Warning leaders not to get suckered into believing the hype about AI-everything, about LLMs building strategies, because most of it is just “trendshop.” 

“AI should [be] used mainly to expand options, not make choices; counteract known and potential biases; remain alert to changing biases.” 

All the tests Harvard conducted, all 15 000 of them, produced the same managerial buzzword responses over and over again: “differentiation,” “collaboration,” “decentralization,” “long-term thinking,” “augmentation.” The same tired slogans, just spewing bullshit! 

The MIT report, The GenAI Divide (July 2025), backs this up, showing that 95% of corporate AI pilot projects failed, because AI doesn’t provide anything new, no productivity gains, and in many cases respondents said it just caused them more work and aggravation. It's a delusion. 

The image below reflects the LLM reality: “trendslop.”

Researchers asked seven leading LLMs to weigh in on seven common strategic trade-offs. What they found was that LLMs consistently recommended strategies aligning with “modern managerial buzzwords and cultural tropes, [regardless of company, business domain,] context and situation-specific strategic logic.” 

Moreover, the models overwhelmingly offered the same buzzwords, every time! Irrespective of the dynamics, variables, and objectives of the ask.  

Strategic biases were persistent, even when context changes.   

Context is everything, humans have it, and machines don’t know meaning.  

“In business, context is hugely important. Surprisingly, adding rich, varied context to our strategic questions seemed to have little effect on the advice ChatGPT offered. Over the course of 15 000 trials, researchers asked ChatGPT to consider the strategic needs of large multinational corporations, tech startups, craft breweries, investment banks, and many other variations. While context tempered the LLM’s biases, it still reliably leaned towards its original recommendations.”

LLMs are just prediction machines, predicting the next word to craft intelligently sounding sentences.

Leaders who let themselves become fascinated with a particular technology, become willfully ignorant to the reality of what the tech can actually do, and are just baking in bad business advice taken from algorithms. 

Handing your business off to a hallucinating machine that doesn’t understand responsibility, reality, or your business, is not very smart, and just introduces new and unnecessary risks. Creating new problems to solve. That’s not efficiency, its ignorance.  

Overall, AI is not a competitive advantage. Everyone has access to the same tools, the same models, and the same outcomes. To sum it up, replacing independent thinking generates the same mediocre answers. However, 6ai is designed to do the opposite. It was created to build intellectual capacity, decision-making confidence, and strategic clarity, enabling users to create outcomes that are truly their own. 

Leadership means the ability to select the right people and systems suited to make complex, often risky decisions in uncertainty. Not just following the ignorant herd. 

I believe I did get across that too many of us have come to an invisible surrender, outsourcing their thinking to AI, becoming a tool for AI companies, rather than the other way around. Increasingly dependent on quick answers, without necessarily understanding the consequences or costs of those actions, which is our judgment, our originality, and our thinking. 

AI may have made everything faster, but it didn’t make you better.

The Silicon Valley AI hegemony has been very successful at reframing outsourcing thinking as progress, where doing less is seen as efficiency and automation feels inevitable. Over time, however, this creates a blind spot. 

Blind to noticing their human agency slipping away. Not realizing what they’re giving up until they’ve already become dependent. 

People are losing their ability to question, challenge, and think for themselves, which is fundamental to the human condition well-being—self-preservation, advancing one’s self-interest and security and sense of purpose and meaning in life.

Instead, many have resigned themselves to cognitive surrender, becoming LLM zombies. 

LLM technology is not inevitable, not by far. You have a choice. In fact, many scientists and those who’ve retained their agency, have concluded that LLMs are a dead end! 

It’s not about overlooking AI, but ensuring that it is used effectively and appropriately, which will enable humans to utilize the full capacity of AI in their own way. 

Outsourcing your judgment just sets you up to eventually be replaced by the same AI you’ve become dependent on. 

Historically speaking, the dangers of technology being used solely as a substitute for man rather than an aid to him have been illustrated time and again. Throughout history, whenever human wisdom has not been included in the equation, the result has always been chaos, vulnerability, and a lack of purposefulness.

Good leadership requires making changes when new evidence comes to your attention. Knowing how and when to pivot, doing better when you know better, is the essence of good progressive leadership. 

Making the shift, from “AI” to “applied intelligence," is straightforward, you’ll go from dependence to ownership, from answers to decisions, and from access to true advantage.