I worked at GitLab before remote work was forced on everyone. At the time, it was the largest all-remote company in the world, and they had something most companies still don't: a real system for making async work.
Not just fewer meetings. A different way of operating.
Everything important was written down. Decisions. Processes. Context. If it wasn't documented, it didn't exist. That wasn't bureaucracy, it was survival. When your team is distributed across time zones, you can't rely on being in the room. The system has to carry the work.
I took those principles with me. Applied them across teams. Design, product, marketing. And every time, the same thing happened. Better accountability. Faster onboarding. Less confusion. More progress without needing another meeting.
Now layer in AI
AI doesn't work off vibes. It works off inputs. And if your inputs are scattered across Slack threads, meetings, and half-finished docs, you don't get intelligence. You get noise at scale.
This is where sources of truth stop being a "nice to have" and start becoming infrastructure.
You're already seeing this play out. MIT researchers found that 95% of enterprise GenAI pilots fail to deliver measurable ROI — and the difference isn't the models, it's how organizations integrate them. Same tools, same access, wildly different outcomes depending on how structured the system is.
That's the fork in the road
One path: Everyone can create anything. Content, designs, code, strategy. But it's inconsistent, off-brand, and hard to trust. Teams spend more time validating than building.
The other path: Clear sources of truth. Documented decisions. Defined systems. AI becomes a multiplier instead of a liability.
This isn't about going fully async. Most teams won't, and don't need to.
But applying async principles? That's where the leverage is:
Write things down so others can build on them. Make decisions visible and traceable. Create systems that don't rely on being in the room.
The companies that do this well won't just move faster. They'll be more coherent.
And in an AI-driven world, coherence is a competitive advantage.