Don’t Start a Forest Fire to Roast a Marshmallow (literally or figuratively with AI)

My friend Andrew Winston has spent the second leg of his career the last two decades working on corporate sustainability, advising some of the largest companies in the world on how good business practices drive good business outcomes, and writing some amazing books. I posted about his first three here and here and here many years ago and oddly didn’t post about his most prominent book with Unilever CEO Paul Polman more recently. Andrew was recently named the #1 Management Thinker in the World by Thinkers50, which I didn’t even know was a thing, but now I get to tease him that he’s Public Intellectual #1.

Andrew had a great idea recently for a small but powerful browser extension that would help users understand when they’re burning more tokens on AI searches by using too complex a model for the task at hand or by letting a given chat go on too long, and then give them a roadmap to reducing their AI energy footprint while achieving comparable outcomes. I call this the “starting a forest fire to roast a marshmallow problem.”

Unlike 24 months ago, he (a non-technical business person – I mean, he is a public intellectual after all) was able to conceive of, build, and deploy software in a matter of a few days. And…Voila! Welcome to the world, Context Coach. This isn’t a commercial effort, at least not at the moment. Andrew just wanted the world to be able to reduce its footprint from AI while still enjoying its benefits.

Here’s his LinkedIn Post, a longer Substack post with more data, the product’s web site, and most important, its Chrome Store listing.

Context Coach will take you about 2 minutes to install, and you’ll see immediate benefits with no disruption to your workflow.