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New Week, New Headlines: AI Joins Your Performance Review, and Sam Altman Says Your Job Wasn’t Real

• Francesca Ranieri • Season 2

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First: AI is now sliding into your performance reviews.

Forbes says it’s here to “remove bias” and “automate feedback.”
We say… careful what you outsource. Because when algorithms start coaching humans, you risk losing the part that actually makes feedback work — connection, trust, and care.

Then: OpenAI’s Sam Altman claimed that if AI wipes out your job, maybe it wasn’t real work to begin with.


Uh, scuzi? We unpack the arrogance behind that take, the history of who decides what “real work” even means, and the danger of rewriting value just because it doesn’t fit into a founder’s business model.

This episode hits the intersection of tech, humanity, and meaning — because it’s not just about AI.


It’s about what makes work worth doing.


Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. The views expressed in this podcast may not be those of the host or the management.

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SPEAKER_01:

Man, what a slap in the face. This isn't the first time roles have shifted or things have been restructured. It doesn't mean that your work wasn't meaningful.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. This is just such a classic founder move, which is we're gonna build the system that breaks the world and then philosophize around whether the job actually deserved to exist. That's the dream. I have yet to find one where I can rent it because I don't want to buy it and then have it in my closet. Although, yeah, maybe I do. I know. It could come in handy. It's a good party favor. I think you would need a big bird costume more than you think you do. Potentially. Yeah. Just show up. It's the feet. It's like the big feathery body, and then it's the feet for me with the rings. Fun. You gotta get someone to dress up as Snuffilepagus. What about you?

SPEAKER_01:

Are you doing anything for Halloween? Nah. Probably just passing out candy if anyone stops by. Our friends used to hold a massive bash each year, but it hasn't come back since COVID, which is making me a little sad. But I love just passing out candy and like watching all the kiddos come up and down the street. Like it's just so fun. Just that like joy of filling up a pillowcase. You know what I really loved? Bonkers. Do you remember bonkers as a kid? Did you have I totally remember bonkers?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes. Yeah. Or kind of like a chewy now and later.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. They're delicious. I know. Bring back some good ones. Get rid of the vanilla wafers. Mel, we're back with New Week, new headlines. What are you talking about this week? I am talking about a Forbes article, The Future of Work Has Arrived. Isn't it isn't it always arriving? Just gonna put that out there. Oh, Earth Eye is rebuilding workplace culture.

SPEAKER_00:

So I am talking about what even is real work last week. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, just said that if AI wipes out your job, maybe it wasn't real work to begin with. And I really want to break this down in terms of what is real work? Want to talk about what he said, probably why he said it, and more importantly, what's the value of real work? Yikes. All right, let's get into it.

SPEAKER_01:

So Forbes put out an article recently. The future of work has arrived, how AI is rebuilding workplace culture. And the premise of the article is good. AI isn't just changing how we work, it's rebuilding the foundations of what we consider workplace culture. Before you roll your eyes, this isn't just another robots are coming for your job story. It's about how AI might help us fix the human stuff that's always been hard, like feedback, growth, and trust. So the contributor here, Taryn Galigali. Galigali, sorry, sorry, Taryn, if I'm mispronouncing that, argues that for decades, performance management specifically has been built on fear. People avoiding feedback because their brains treat feedback like danger. He literally compared it in the article to being followed down a dark alley. And there is neuroscience to support some of that. And what they feel is that AI has the potential to automate reviews to take the fear out of them. Leaders from Lattice, Headspace, Bamboo HR, and others told him the same thing that they feel AI can process more context than we as humans ever could, helping managers coach in real time, removing bias from hard conversations. But there's a flip side to that too. And I'm sure you're already thinking about that flip side as I go through this. So are we using AI to get better at being human or to avoid being humans altogether? That's the argument that we're coming up with here.

SPEAKER_00:

That's my biggest issue. One of the age-old issues with performance management is that people wait until a mid-year conversation or a year-end conversation to have it. And by the way, most people are like, oh shit, I gotta do my performance reviews. And so they're just jamming it all in at the last minute. So the quality of feedback and the quantity of feedback sucks. So we already hate doing it. Now, basically, if we say we're gonna outsource it to AI, is it ever gonna get done?

SPEAKER_01:

If you're doing it the right way where it's continuous, it's not just focused on constructive change, but feedback on the good things that are going really well, then you don't need an AI tool to sift through a ton of context to help you provide the feedback because it's happening in real time in conversations. And it shouldn't feel like a fear that you have like you would walking down a dark alley if it's just expected this is how we work together. We're constantly having these conversations and helping each other grow and improve. So the arguments were in kind of five areas that I'd love to talk through. Their first argument is AI is lowering the feedback fear. Brian Croft at Bamboo HR again said, We're wired to panic when someone says, Can I give you feedback? It triggers that fight or flight instinct for people. Neuroscience does support this. There is a threat response. Research from the Neuroleadership Institute in Harvard shows that being evaluated activates your amygdala, the brain's danger center, just like a physical threat. But what this is missing is that culture shapes that reaction as well. You and I both know this because we've been in both types of environments, right? There's like those high trust environments where someone says, Can I give you some feedback? You don't have that fear response because you don't think it's going to be weaponized. We've also been in environments where that was not used to be constructive and it's been used to be weaponized. Very different responses happen in those two environments. So this is this ignoring like AI is not going to solve the culture problem that's happening, the like root problem that might be happening in some toxic cultures. Although not wrong necessarily, that's ignoring that. They think that context is going to beat the calendar here. Sarah Franklin at Lattice noted that AI can absorb so much more context than a human can, which is technically true, but more context doesn't always mean more connection for an individual. The real conversation is going to have more value than the data summaries. There's nothing that can replace that. They think that continuous development is going to replace performance reviews. AI-driven tools mean feedback isn't just once a year. It's all year. You and I just noted you don't need AI to make feedback all year long. But if you're constantly under a microscope with AI analyzing all of your outputs day in and day out, what kind of continuous development are you really getting? Does it just start to feel like constant evaluation because it's coming from a system versus an authentic conversation with somebody that cares about your development and growth? AI doesn't care about your career track. They're not interacting with you on a personal level. So the connection there is lost. The other argument they have there is that small and exceptional teams are going to be winning a little bit more here. Linear's Christina Cordover said that they're going to keep teams intentionally small and raise an insanely high bar, translation, quality over quantity. And they think that AI might make those lean teams more powerful, but it's also, as you and I know, with less resources and higher expectations, going to put the pressure on that they need to produce more and more with less and less. So I'm not really understanding how that's a positive necessarily for folks. It's just increasing the pressure that they're putting on them. And then the last argument was that managers are still a bottleneck. The conversation was everyone agrees manager capability is the real limiting factor here. And AI can give every manager a coach in their pocket. But in the article, they said this isn't a tech problem, it's a change management problem. If we don't teach people how to use AI with empathy, it's not going to fix the culture. It's going to speed up the dysfunction, which I wholeheartedly agree with 100%. You and I just talk about the manager training. Sucks everywhere. No one's getting it. Thoughts. What are your thoughts here? Do you want AI giving all the feedback? I see some value in it, but I don't know. This feels like a lazy way to address what meaningful performance improvement or performance coaching can do for someone.

SPEAKER_00:

Like, how is if you're on Microsoft Teams, is it collating all of your conversations with this person and talking about things they're doing well, things are not doing well?

SPEAKER_01:

It could work across systems just to pool in all the data, what's happening and CRMs and all the different platforms and engagement. There's plenty of AI tools that are used in coaching conversations to help people like, was there an opportunity miss, things that you can follow up on? I think there's really great technology out there to help make people smarter on information that they might miss from a human standpoint. But it sounds here like the argument is let's take the human out of it altogether on this very important process. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

This is the thing I would caution everybody about, especially as organizations are looking to, and you and I have talked about this. We have predicted this, we are already seeing vestiges of this happening. It will continue to happen. Most organizations, and I know this might sound freaky, but most organizations are planning to be 30 to 40 percent smaller than they are today. Yeah. In the next few years. Because to your very good point, they're planning on having smaller teams, they're probably planning on having more adaptable teams, they're planning on being stocking those leaders with a genic AI, collaborative AI, some employees, gig workers. It's going to be this menage. Not arguing that. But what I am arguing is I would much rather have people focus not on using AI to offload coaching, but thinking about how do we up-level people's capability to think about how to orchestrate that work as a whole. Maybe AI is a component of it, but my big concern is I don't hear anyone in these conversations saying, here's how we're going to make that human even more skilled at expert coaching, expert leadership. It feels like it's, I'm going to take this off your plate. It absolutely feels like that, as opposed to I'm going to level you up as a coach.

SPEAKER_01:

I am all for the equity of AI tools, identifying gaps and maybe how you're coaching someone or missed opportunities, 100% eliminating bias. Absolutely. We've met with experts all the time. People want to feel like someone gives a shit about them, like they matter. We met with Zach Mercurio. If you start cutting out that relationship between boss and employee, and it feels like someone cares about your career and you're removing them from this ongoing performance discussion. I don't know. I think that's dangerous territory. 100% love the combination of human AI collaboration on this, but yeah, I don't know. I don't think this is something we can outsource to AI. AI is not going to rebuild your bad culture. AI isn't going to fix your trust problem.

SPEAKER_00:

I go back to the tenets of the work we do with reciprocal work, right? When you are looking at what makes a great boss employee relationship. Yes, feedback is a part of that and coaching is a part of it, but it's also aligning your relationship to make sure you're on the right page. It's so that you're getting the development you need, that you're getting the feedback that you need, that you're getting the recognition that you need, that you're getting the development you need. And it is much more systematic than AI can give you.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Yeah. I'm an AI optimist, not to confuse anyone, but I just think there's a lot of conversation that I'm seeing that concerns me around like ripping out humans completely from the process. There's not like a lot of thoughtfulness happening.

SPEAKER_00:

All right. So I don't know if you saw this or not, Mel, but Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, just said if AI wipes out your job, maybe it wasn't real work to begin with. He says, quote, if you're farming, you're doing something people really need. That's real work. So apparently, if you're not producing calories or coding robots, you're just playing pretend on Zoom. And I'm curious if you saw this article.

SPEAKER_01:

I did not see that article, but man, what a slap in the face to people. This isn't the first time roles have shifted or things have been restructured. It doesn't mean that your work wasn't meaningful.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. I think this is just such a classic founder move, which is we're going to build the system that breaks the world and then philosophize around whether the job actually deserved to exist. The thing that really bothers me about this is the value judgment about what really is real work. He's not just talking about job loss here or that jobs are going to be gone. He's talking about if it even counts. And fair question, but it begs a very interesting question around who decides. Who decides what is real and what is valuable? And went down a little bit of a rabbit hole. A lot of us think that the value of work is obvious, but it's not. It's actually been very prescribed. Like historically, the people not doing the work decide what's valuable. In ancient Greece, manual labor was low class. In the industrial age, the noble, in the tech age, suddenly, if you make slides instead of things, you're a visionary. You look at like how consulting, for instance, has been absolutely up-leveled or strategy consultants or companies like Apple or Nike, for example, like your ability to tell a story is above all the greatest thing you can have in terms of a capability that has been developed over the last, especially around knowledge work, over the last 30 years that Silicon Valley is very responsible for. And now because it doesn't fit into their metaphor of what's valuable, all of a sudden, all of the work that these people are doing that AI is going to impact, it wasn't real anyway. So all of us sitting in jobs in customer service and law and accounting, like you're not really doing real work anyway. It's actually like flat in the face. Yeah, it's totally arrogant.

SPEAKER_01:

It's totally arrogant. It's interesting timing considering the bad press AI is getting around not being as effective as it was expected to be. Right. That it's going to have its own crash, similar to the dot-com crash, and then to come out in the forefront and then make a broad statement that these weren't real jobs anyway, is interesting. You can't claim that you're trying to do something for good and build something for good of humanity and then come out and tell a ton of people that their worth and their work meant nothing.

SPEAKER_00:

It's classic gaslighting. I think about people that have been sitting in roles for 20 years, all of a sudden beats hold because somebody believes it's not valuable to them anymore because it doesn't fit in the paradigm of how they're going to make money, that you're not valuable anymore. It's classic gaslighting. It's absolutely classic gaslighting. And there's two dangers here, especially with AI, that we need to start paying attention to. One is absolutely the job loss. And we're already seeing that. We talked about this a couple of months ago, around a lot of CEOs being like, AI is not going to take your job. Somebody that knows how to use AI and then in the same breath, lay off 4,000 people and have AI replace it, verbatim, and/or in the case of, for instance, Accenture, lay people off saying they're just unable to be reskilled, which is typically not true. We will have significant job loss. We are having significant job loss. It will continue to be there. But it's also this identity shift that we're not talking about. That what happens when people lose the identity that's been attached to not their job, but their career, to their life's work. You and I have seen people go through that. You are working with people every single week, going through massive transitions, whether it's job loss, retirement, whatever. That is a huge hit psychologically. Oh, yeah. On top of that, to have CEOs like the CEO of Accenture saying, you were unable to be reskilled, or Sam Altman come out and say, it wasn't real work anyway, is a double hit. And I would love for executives and leaders in positions to be much more careful about the language they're using as it relates to AI. Because you can plan on what you're doing all you want, but say, listen, the rules of the game have changed, or hey, we're not doing well economically. So we need to lay people off. Don't put that burden on other people when they're already going to be going through hell. Yeah, take accountability. Stop being lazy with it. A thousand percent. Yeah. What a statement to make. Oh my God. My prediction here and my big concern here is on people's well-being and mental health. Like the long-term unemployment numbers, awful. I think the way we think about this and we talk about this, we need to do this way more responsibly.

SPEAKER_01:

This episode was produced, edited in all things by us, myself, Mel Platt, and Francesca Reneri. Our music is by Pink Zebra. And if you loved this conversation and you want to contribute your thoughts with us, please do. You can visit us at your workfriends.com. But you can also join us over on LinkedIn. We have a LinkedIn community page, and we have the TikToks and Instagram. So please join us in the socials. And if you like this and you've benefited from this episode and you think someone else can benefit from this episode, please rate and subscribe. We'd really appreciate it. That helps keep us going. Take care, friend. Bye, friends. Bye friends.

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Francesca Ranieri

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Mel Plett

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