"I'm sorry, I couldn't help but overhear you"

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t help but overhear you.”

It’s Tuesday night. I’m at a bar in Wilmington. That’s usually not a sentence I want to hear from the guy on the next stool.

I was mentoring a young guy a friend connected me with, the kind of conversation I love, when he stepped away for a minute.

The man beside me leaned over and said those words.

I braced myself.

“The way you’re describing what you’re doing with AI in corporate services, we really need that. I’m down from Manhattan meeting with clients.”

We talked for a while. Swapped cards. The next morning he sent me a note.

One line stopped me cold:

“It’s better to be the one drawing the new map rather than navigating it later.”

I’ve been in probably 100 AI conversations this year. Almost all of them are about speed. About doing what we already do, faster.

This guy was asking a completely different question.

On a barstool in Delaware on a Tuesday night.

The companies that pull ahead aren’t going to be the ones who got faster.

They’re going to be the ones who decided to draw a new map entirely.