Reports in the age of AI

I'm currently working on a report for a client. The purpose of the report isn't really to do anything else but provide an audit trail; it won't be read by many people, nor does it contain anything I haven't already shared in other documents along the way.

I should imagine that at least one person who is tasked with reading the report will ask an LLM to summarise it. And at least one more will skim the executive summary and jump straight to the recommendations. It's a performative piece of work, especially in the age of AI, and feels like we're stuck on nouns (documents, platforms, etc.) rather than verbs (information flows, open working, etc.)

'Status' based meetings, where the only purpose is to catch up on what has been completed, are already anachronistic. It's been a decade since WAO to check out (and update) kanban boards so that we didn't have to waste time just telling each other what we did. Meetings are for decisions, and reports even more so.

The information in the report I'm writing will end up in a silo of a PDF, when it could very easily be part of a knowledge management system. There's no reason even pre-AI why this couldn't have been the case: plenty of people could discover this project who otherwise would have been unaware by there being a defined knowledge management workflow. That just got a lot easier with AI.

What I'd like to see is something that goes even further than Tom Watson's Open Recommendations site (which "frees your PDFs") towards something that treats the container not as a 'document' but as a 'information' which will interact with other information to create 'insight'.

If I had more budget for this project, I'd be tempted to turn it into a linked resource, much like Substrate. I can also imagine the 'report' being living dashboards, annotated transcripts, or shared kanban boards that replace the final report entirely. For example, my daughter's work experience project is being done on whiteboard, paper, and a Whimsical board. I'm not going to then ask her to write up a report, but rather present from the Whimsical board about her work. So it's a tidying-up, rather than a completely different container.

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Image: CC BY Marcin Wilkowski