SEPTEMBER 2026  SEEDWORLD.COM/CANADA   15
Find your AI caddy 
	 and then go 
  hit the shot.
Shawn Brook 
President, Seed World Group
BUSINESS GROWTH
E
very conversation about AI seems to collapse 
into one of two camps. One side is convinced 
it is going to replace everyone. The other waves it 
off as another overhyped tool that will fade like the 
last one. I think both are wrong, and I think being 
stuck in either camp is quietly costing people more 
than they realize.
I launched my own AI assistant recently. At 
first I imagined it as another member of the team. 
I even called it my “AI Chief of Staff.” That was 
my first mistake. I was treating it like a person, a 
second Shawn I could hand things to. But that is 
not what it is. It is not another name on the org 
chart. It is an extension of me.
So I renamed it. I called it Caddy. If you golf, 
you already understand the whole philosophy. A 
caddy carries the clubs, reads the green, handles 
the routine, and offers a point of view on the shot 
in front of you. But the caddy never swings. When 
it is time to hit, the golfer steps up, and the golfer 
owns where the ball lands. Nobody blames the 
caddy for a shot in the water.
That is exactly how I use AI. It takes the repeti­
tive work off my plate and feeds me ideas faster 
than I would reach them on my own. But every 
decision that matters. Every relationship, every 
conversation with real stakes, that is still mine. I 
am not trying to build a second version of me. I am 
trying to free up the version that already exists to 
spend more time on the handful of things only I 
can do.
Watch any company adopt AI and you will see 
people sort themselves into three groups. Some 
lean on it too hard and let it think for them. Some 
barely touch it and hope it goes away. A few find 
the sweet spot. Here is how you know you are 
in that third group: your work gets better, and so 
does your life and the environment around you. 
That is the whole test. If AI is making your output 
worse or making your team’s experience worse, 
you are using it wrong.
Let me be honest about where we all are. 
None of us has this figured out. Not me, not 
you, and probably not even the compa­
nies building these tools. That is exactly 
why you cannot afford to watch from 
the sidelines. This is not a spectator 
technology. You have to get your hands 
dirty, and you have to start now.
You are going to try things that flop. 
You will automate tasks you never 
should have touched. And somewhere 
in that mess you will also stumble 
onto workflows that hand you 
back hours every week. That is 
not failure. That is the tuition. 
The real lesson for me had 
nothing to do with prompts or 
software. It was about where 
people still create value once a 
machine can produce the deliver­
able in seconds.
Here is where I have landed. The value was 
never really the final deliverable. It is the think­
ing behind it. The judgment. The planning. The 
relationships. The ability to connect ideas in a way 
a model simply cannot. Protect that, sharpen that, 
and lead with that.
Which brings me to the line I keep coming 
back to. Yes, if you are not experimenting with 
AI, you are probably falling behind. But if all you 
are doing is flooding the world with AI-generated 
slop, you are falling behind just as fast. You just 
have more to show for it.

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