Why ambitious goals win

Ask a team to grow results by 2 percent and watch what happens.

They work 2 percent harder. Longer hours. A few more calls. The same approach, pushed a little further.

It rarely works, and when it does, it costs everyone.

Now ask the same team for 50 percent.

They cannot get there by working harder. The math does not allow it. Nobody has 50 percent more hours in a day.

So they are forced to do the only thing that actually moves a business. They change the approach. They question the process. They look for the idea that was off the table when the target was small.

Andrew Ng said something in June that stuck with me. Incremental gains are often harder to drive than transformative ones.

It sounds backwards. It is not.

Small targets keep you inside the current way of doing things, where every gram of improvement is already being squeezed. Big targets push you outside it, where the easy wins still live.

This is the part most leaders get wrong with AI. They aim it at a small efficiency gain on a task. Safe, modest, and weirdly difficult.

The teams getting real value aim it at something that looks impossible, and discover the impossible version was the simpler one.

Stop asking your best people to try a little harder.

Give them a target so big that trying harder is off the table.

What would you rethink completely if the target was 50 percent, not 2?

Source: Andrew Ng, The Future of AI Agents, Interrupt 26 (LangChain, June 2026)