The conclusion that software is unlikely to ever exhibit intelligent behavior was reached by a powerful new interpretation of skillful action based in the work of modern philosophers. The essence of their interpretation is that skillful action always occurs in a context set by conversations, and in the conversations people perform speech acts by which they commit to and generate the action.

Expert behavior requires an exquisite sensitivity to context and an ability to know what to commit to. Computing machines, which are purposely designed to process symbols independent of their context, have no hope of becoming experts. Winograd and Flores said that questions on the AI agenda at the time, such as "Can a machine think?", are meaningless. They proposed instead that we use our understanding of action-through-language to improve the way we design computers to effectively support human practice.