What AI Summaries Miss (And Your Body Catches)

The summaries were perfect. They missed everything.

In February 2023, I ran World Government Summit keynotes through two AI summarization tools. I was testing a theory: could AI save me the 6+ hours of watching, rewatching, and cross-referencing speeches from global leaders?

The summaries came back fast. Technically accurate. They captured the high-level points from every keynote.

They missed everything that mattered.

Elon Musk's speech had an ominous undertone that didn't appear in any summary. There were subconscious corrections in his phrasing, moments where he started to say something and redirected mid-sentence. Klaus Schwab's words carried a weight that the bullet points stripped away. The power dynamics between what these leaders said and what they carefully didn't say were invisible to the AI.

I found myself craving something the tools couldn't give me: direct quotes. The actual words, in order, with the pauses and pivots intact.

So I went back and watched the videos myself, cross-referencing the AI-generated transcripts line by line.

The AI didn't save me time. It saved me from the thing I actually needed to do: pay attention.

I named something I'd been circling for weeks: "This itself is a limitation of AI: nuance."

3 years later, I still stand behind every word.

Your Body Reads What AI Can't

AI processes language. Humans process intention. Those are fundamentally different operations, and they happen in fundamentally different places. Language processing is computational. Intention processing is somatic.

That tightness in your chest when a deal sounds too good. The hesitation before saying yes to an opportunity your calendar can accommodate but your body resists. The way someone's voice shifts mid-sentence and something in your gut says, "That wasn't the original thought."

These are survival instruments. And they're the exact capabilities that 3 years of AI adoption have trained us to override.

I see it in coaching conversations every week. A leader gets an AI-generated summary of a board meeting. The summary is clean. Accurate. Well-organized. Something feels thin about it, but they can't articulate what's missing, so they move forward with the AI's version.

That feeling of "thin" is data.

When you override your gut because the AI gave you a clean summary, you're trading your best instrument for a faster one. Sometimes speed is the right tradeoff. But for the decisions that define your career, your relationships, your legacy? A summary is almost never what you actually need.

I said this in 2023: "Do not outsource your humanity." I also wrote: "People building AI have powerful incentives for you to use it and get hooked."

Both of those warnings aged exactly the way I hoped they wouldn't.

The Gut-Check Protocol

I developed this protocol during that World Government Summit experience and refined it through hundreds of coaching conversations since. It works for any AI-generated output: summaries, analyses, recommendations, strategy drafts.

It takes about 5 minutes and it has saved me from more bad decisions than any AI tool has.

Step 1: Read it once. Don't analyze. Don't cross-reference. Just read the AI output the way you'd read a letter from someone you know well.

Step 2: Notice what your body does. Shoulders tighten? Jaw clench? Something feels "off" but you can't name it? Your stomach drops on a particular paragraph? A section feels weirdly flat compared to what you expected?

All of that is data. Real-time somatic intelligence that's been calibrated by every conversation, negotiation, and relationship you've ever navigated.

Step 3: Go to the source for any section your body flagged. Read the original document. Watch the actual meeting recording. Have the live conversation.

The AI saved you from reading the whole thing. That's genuinely useful. Your body told you which parts to read yourself. That's the part that matters.

(If you're reading this and your shoulders just tightened: that tension itself is data.)

The craving I felt in 2023 for depth over breadth was my body's editorial instinct doing what it's been trained to do across 20+ years of working with high-profile leaders and 20,000+ articles: find the signal in the noise.

AI can compress information. Your body can tell you whether the information matters.

Both are useful. Only one of them is yours.

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