The Tap-and-Done Illusion: Why Mobile Convenience Is Costing Sellers Real Readiness

Micro-completion syndrome

There’s a quiet epidemic going on…yes another! It’s the illusion of completion. The illusion of understanding. The illusion that, because you skimmed something on your phone while juggling a coffee and dodging Slack pings, you're now “done” with it and can say convincingly “I got it.”

Let’s call it what it is: convenience masquerading as comprehension.

1. The Convenience Trade-Off

Humans will trade almost anything for convenience (as we’ve demonstrated with security time and time again) — and increasingly, what we’re sacrificing is understanding. When we engage with complex ideas or strategic content on mobile devices, we often feel like we’ve dealt with it. But we haven’t. We've just swiped over it.

There’s plenty of research to back this up:

• Reading comprehension is significantly lower on phones compared to desktops or printed formats, especially for complex material (Nielsen Norman Group).

• In a meta-analysis of 450,000 readers, those reading on paper had up to 8x better retention and comprehension than digital readers (Axios).

• Multitasking and distraction are far more common on mobile, further eroding the ability to process and retain information (MDPI Study).

  
  

We mistake exposure for comprehension — and mobile devices make that mistake easier to fall into than ever.

2. The Age of “Everyone’s an Expert”

Add to this our modern tendency to want to be the smartest person in the room, and it’s no wonder we’ve created a culture of superficial expertise.

People show up to meetings having “seen the doc” — which is code for “I opened it on my phone, scrolled a bit, then forgot everything except the title.” The mobile-first mindset makes it look like we’re engaging. But it often replaces actual diligence with a false sense of productivity.

That’s not preparation. That’s just proximity to content.

3. Why Some Companies Are Re-Thinking “Mobile First”

This is why some of the more insightful technology and sales enablement companies have deliberately not prioritized a mobile-first experience — as counterintuitive as that may sound today.

Because real preparation — especially in sales, strategy, or decision-making — doesn’t lend itself to two-thumb input and screen real estate the size of a credit card.

Instead, they optimize for comprehension over convenience. They design tools that support actual understanding, not just surface-level interaction.

To borrow a football metaphor (and we often do):

A bog-standard LLM might get you to the 50-yard line faster. A more specialized tool can get you into the red zone. But scoring the touchdown? That still takes you. It takes comprehension. It takes judgment. It takes knowing the play — not just glancing at the playbook on your phone.

TL;DR (for those of you reading this on your phone 😉):

Convenience ≠ comprehension. Mobile makes it easy to engage with content. But it also makes it dangerously easy to believe you’ve understood it — when you haven’t. Some companies are deliberately rethinking mobile-first design for this reason.

Because in high-stakes environments like B2B sales, real readiness beats the illusion of it.

A Little Knowledge Is a Dangerous Thing—Until You Add AI

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” That line—first penned by Alexander Pope in the early 1700s—was never meant as a compliment. It was a warning. The idea was that a shallow understanding of something is actually worse than knowing nothing at all. It gives people misplaced confidence, prompting them to leap into situations they’re not qualified to handle. Think Dunning-Kruger with a powdered wig.

In business, this has historically played out in all kinds of ways—overconfident leaders making reckless decisions, consultants bluffing their way through client meetings, or employees misinterpreting data and taking the company off a cliff. And until recently, the antidote was clear: more depth, more expertise, more time spent drinking deeply from the fountain of knowledge.

But then… AI happened.

The Rise of “Just Enough” Knowledge

We’re now living in a time where a little knowledge + a powerful AI assistant can sometimes get the job done. In fact, some are calling this shift the democratization of expertise. You no longer need a PhD in supply chain optimization to ask ChatGPT for a workflow improvement model—or a marketing degree to create a full-funnel campaign plan.

And that’s… unsettling. Especially if you’re in the business of being the expert—consultants, advisors, analysts, strategists. AI can draft your proposal, outline your go-to-market strategy, recommend KPIs, and even roleplay your next sales call. It can do in seconds what used to take hours of billable work.

But here’s the catch...

Knowing What to Do Isn’t the Same as Knowing How to Do It

This is where the distinction matters. AI can give you the “what” and sometimes even the “how.” But it can’t give you the judgment, experience, or execution muscle to make it all work in the real world.

Case in point: Mike Burry.

Before he became famous for betting against the housing market in The Big Short, Burry wasn’t a traditional finance guy. He was a medical doctor—a neurosurgeon-in-training who taught himself how to invest. He started reading 10-Ks for fun (who hasn’t) after his hospital shifts. He didn’t know Wall Street, but he had a capability to process massive amounts of data, spot patterns, and follow the logic where it led—even when no one else could see it, and no one else believed him.

In many ways, Burry had a “little knowledge”—but it was paired with obsessive learning, something of an unusual personality, giving him the ability to connect dots. Now we all have access to AI we can ALL process bigger amounts of data and use the AI to surface patterns and connect those dots. It’s a force multiplier.

So Where Does That Leave Us?

AI isn’t replacing experts. But it is changing the rules of what it means to be one. Here’s the new reality:

• AI helps you do more with less expertise—but not without consequences. Misapplied, it can enable confident amateurs to make very professional mistakes.

• AI raises the bar for experts. It forces real professionals to move beyond surface-level knowledge and focus on the judgment, nuance, and action AI can’t replicate. Someone said we’ve moved from the information age into the interpretation age.

• AI empowers a new kind of operator. Like Burry, those who can combine AI’s raw processing power with human insight, skepticism, and strategic action will reshape industries.

  
  

Final Thought: We’re All Burry Now—Or We’d Better Be

A little knowledge is still dangerous. But in 2025, the bigger danger may be assuming AI knows enough for you.

The opportunity? Learning how to think like Mike Burry in a world where AI can give you answers, but not necessarily the whole picture – that remains up to us.

Why the Best AI for Sales Still Leaves Room for the Human

Luke Wilson plays an average man who wakes up in the future to find that society has become so dumbed-down he’s now the smartest person alive.

Shortcuts are seductive—but sales still needs a brain, not just a bot. Most AI sales tools make bold claims. But if we’re not careful, we’re going to miss the point.

Let’s be clear: AI is not the enemy of sales. But mindless automation is.

The usual view of dystopian future has most of us becoming irrelevant replaced by robots looking and acting more and more “human.” The real danger pointed out by far fewer speculators is that humans start to behave more like robots (or AI). In fact, it’s the overly prescriptive, “just press send” kind of AI that is a sign of this. Tools that remove all friction, all thinking, and all responsibility from the seller’s process may feel like progress, but it’s the kind that gets us closer to the future portrayed in Idiocracy. A world where human thinking has gone the way of the dodo.

The Football Analogy: AI Gets You Up the Field, But You Still Have to Score

• Moving on from Hollywood (or maybe not) to pro football, here’s my favorite analogy - General-purpose AI tools? They’ll get you 50 yards. Purpose-built AI with domain knowledge? That’ll get you 80. But the last 20? That’s on you.

• Sales remains a field of nuance, judgment calls, reading defenses (aka buyers), and improvising under pressure. If your AI is trying to do all of that for you, you’re not selling—you’re outsourcing your brain. That’s why we believe in consciously designing gaps into AI tools—spaces where the human is meant to step in.

Why Humans Still Matter in AI-Driven Sales

• Take something like sales messaging. A lot of AI tools will auto-generate an email, add the recipient, and fire it off before the rep has even taken a breath. Efficiency? Sure. Effective? Probably not.

• The problem? It removes the moment of pause— where the seller says, “Does this actually make sense for this person, right now?” That pause is where better thinking happens. It’s where relevance and context reside. It’s where judgment kicks in. And if we automate that away, we don’t get better sellers. We become passengers.

That’s why AI in sales shouldn’t just be about speed. It should be about helping the seller think better, faster.

Beware the In-House Trap: Built by Technologists, Not Sellers

• Another trend we’re seeing is companies building their own in-house sales AI. On the surface, it sounds smart—more control, tailored to your data, customized workflows.

  
  

• But here’s the problem: most in-house AI projects are technology-driven, not sales-driven. They’re led by engineers, not sellers. They’re architected by people who think in  funnels and pipelines—but not politics, pressure, or the psychology of a skeptical buyer.

The result? Tools that are technically impressive but miss the subtle and messy realities of B2B sales—like knowing when to challenge a prospect versus when to listen, how to interpret buying signals, or how to detect a stalled deal.

Returning to the football analogy, AI without context and domain empathy is like running the same offensive plays paying no attention to how the defense lines up.

The Middle Path: Between General AI and Custom Rigid Systems

The sales AI landscape today looks like:

• general AI tools that offer useful, but generic shortcuts (a good place to start)

• Over simplified rigid tools with fixed, overly prescriptive outcomes

• Fully baked enterprise tools, that are expensive, complex, and confusing

We believe there’s a better path: It’s more about augmentation - assistance, not abdication.

That means building AI that knows what it’s doing—but also knows what it shouldn’t do.

The Bigger Picture: Human-in-the-Loop by Design

If you zoom out beyond sales, this is the larger philosophical challenge of AI in any domain: How do we keep humans meaningfully in the loop? You have to force them. Humans are hard-wired to extract as much utility for minimum inputs of energy and effort.

Because let’s face it: the danger of AI is not that it becomes super intelligent and takes over. The danger is that it becomes good enough that we stop trying, and then we wake up one day and we're living in an “Idiocracy.”

Final Thought: Progress Shouldn’t Be Passive

There’s nothing wrong with speed. Or shortcuts. Or efficiency. But when you outsource all the thinking, you also lose the learning. You lose the edge. AI should make sellers better. It should make mediocre ones more thoughtful. It should make great ones faster—but not passive.

Scoring that touchdown still takes a person, not just a playbook.