Tim Shea, Founder and CEO of Latticework Insights, joined Neil Twa on the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast (Episode 269) for a conversation that pushes back on the more breathless AI takes: is constant reliance on AI tools actually making teams — and a whole generation of workers — less sharp, not more capable?

Tim’s position: AI is a genuinely useful “helpful assistant,” but it’s frequently mis-branded as something closer to real intelligence, which leads teams to lean on it in ways that add confusion instead of clarity. The real, underlying problem he keeps running into with clients hasn’t changed in 25 years of doing this work — it’s fragmented data. Most retail and DTC companies have their business scattered across 10 to 30 different platforms, each telling a slightly different version of the story, with no single source of truth to reconcile them. Centralizing that data is what actually lets a team see their business clearly enough to make good decisions — AI or no AI. The conversation also covers why upskilling marketers and data teams to speak a common language matters more than which specific tool they’re handed, and why brand storytelling is still what makes a company memorable in a market this crowded.

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If fragmented data is quietly making every decision at your company slower, get in touch — untangling exactly that is what Latticework does.