It's Not How Much AI, It's How Well: A Practical Spectrum for Advanced AI Use (zachwills.net)

The author argues that the right question isn’t “how much AI was used?” but “how well was it used?” and presents a practical four-stage AI Sophistication Spectrum to move teams from clerical help to strategic, scalable systems. Using meeting notes as a running example, the stages are: Stage 1 — The Organizer (structure raw transcripts into actionable plans); Stage 2 — The Analyst (infer sentiment, subtext, and strategic recommendations — requires stronger reasoning models like Gemini 2.5 Pro); Stage 3 — The Architect (design meta‑prompts that reliably elicit high-value analysis, demonstrated with a detailed seven‑section prompt template); and Stage 4 — The Platform Builder (automate end‑to‑end workflows: trigger, ingest, preprocess, analyze, deliver, store, and feedback). The framework matters because it reframes AI adoption as a spectrum of skills and systems rather than a binary badge of “AI” usage. Key technical implications include deliberate model selection for reasoning tasks, investing in prompt engineering and meta‑prompting to produce replicable outputs, and embedding those prompts into pipelines that automate ingestion, redaction, analysis, notification, archival, and continuous prompt refinement. The roadmap emphasizes human-in-the-loop iterative refinement as the multiplier: experts critique and tune outputs to raise both the floor (consistency) and the ceiling (strategic insight) across an organization.