The Anchoring Gap

The anchoring effect that Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman documented in laboratory settings operates with the same mechanical reliability in boardrooms, project plans, and institutional assumptions. But the laboratory experiments were conducted in stable environments: the roulette wheel was irrelevant to the estimate, and the correct answer was knowable in principle. The AI transition presents a different problem—one in which the environment itself is changing faster than the cognitive system can track, and in which the anchors were set in a world that no longer exists. The anchoring gap names this condition: the distance between what pre-AI assumptions predict and what AI-augmented reality delivers, which widens with every month that the technology advances and the adjustment from the anchor falls short. A team that estimated six weeks for a feature build was not incompetent; it was anchored on genuine experience from a different world. The working version arrived by Wednesday—less than three days. The gap between the anchor and