For most of the office era, standards could settle because the tools beneath them held still.
A team could build its templates, checklists and presentation conventions around the same software and keep them for years. Word, Excel and PowerPoint improved occasionally, but never so quickly that businesses had to rethink what counted as good enough every few months.
The tools moved slowly, so the standards built around them could remain stable. AI breaks that arrangement.
Models are updated repeatedly, and their reasoning, research and agentic abilities keep expanding. They are also beginning to sit above traditional business software, operating browsers, databases and familiar office tools on our behalf, or replacing entire steps by working directly with the underlying information. The ground beneath the standard is now moving fast.
This changes what good enough means. Good enough was always an economic judgment: work sufficient for the purpose, given the time and cost of doing better. When AI sharply reduces that time and cost, the old stopping point can become outdated even though the task itself has not changed.
A market analysis is still a market analysis. But if AI can now gather more evidence, test more scenarios and compare more alternatives at a fraction of yesterday's cost, the old threshold may still save money today, but may no longer make business sense.
So a business can no longer ask only whether the work meets its standard. It must also ask whether that standard still reflects what today's tools make possible. Businesses that fail to raise the bar as capability rises may find themselves falling behind competitors whose standards have already moved.
That question has to be asked again and again, because the tools keep improving even when the job in front of you does not.
The work still passes, and the professional keeps applying yesterday's threshold. But that means standing still on moving ground. The standard has to move with the tools.
Frank Ng is a retired NASDAQ CEO, who co-authors this column with his son Ryan after publishing their book Hey AI, Let's Talk!
