AI: Magic or Miss? Potential. Cheap Labor. Productivity Mirage. Brain Fry.

AI: Magic or Miss

AI has officially become the corporate answer to everything.

Need more productivity? AI.
Need fewer people? AI.
Need to sound innovative on an earnings call? Definitely AI.

But underneath all the hype, a real question is starting to creep in:

Is this actually making work better — or are we just making bigger decisions on shakier logic?

In this episode, we get into the gap between the promise of AI and what’s actually happening inside organizations right now: burnout, bad strategy, fuzzy thinking, and leaders making workforce bets before the evidence is really there.

We talk about where AI is genuinely useful, where it’s being wildly overapplied, and why so many companies seem more focused on not falling behind than on solving a real problem.

Because this tech could be magical.
It could free people up for better thinking, better work, and better outcomes.

But that’s not where a lot of organizations are headed.

They’re chasing efficiency.
They’re cutting before redesigning.
And they’re mistaking motion for strategy.

So: is AI a breakthrough?
Or are we using it in ways that quietly make work worse?

That’s the conversation.

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.

Thanks for listening!  

Hey! We love new friends! Connect with us!

• On The Socials!  You Tube, TikTok, Instagram on LinkedIn - Mel + Francesca.
• The LinkedIn Group:  We'd love to have you join the Your Work Friends Group on LinkedIn
• Drop Us a Line: Send us your ideas,  questions, comments, complements, whatnot, to friend@yourworkfriends.com

Transcript

AI Productivity Hype And Fear

Speaker 2 0:00

We're seeing it even before there's been really solid data that AI makes your teams more productive. We see studies here and there, but organizations are making massive cuts because of it.'Cause it is an illusion right now.

Speaker 0:15

Yeah. The illusion is scary. A call comes back to choices

Speaker 2 0:32

welcome to your work friends. I'm Francesca.

Speaker 0:35

And I'm Mel. And we're breaking down the now next of work. So you get ahead, Mel. We're back with new week, new headlines. What are you talking

Speaker 2 0:43

about today?

Speaker 0:44

I'm talking about ai, brain fry, critical thinking, loss, trend swap, and, how work is going to feel less human in 2026.

Speaker 2 0:55

Oh, okay. So just like a light and airy show.

Speaker 0:58

Very light and airy and there's hope on the horizon. There's also a little, here's what good looks like and what you could be doing. Yeah.

Speaker 2 1:06

All right. Cool.

Speaker 1:06

What about you?

Speaker 2 1:07

I'm noticing here I wanna talk about. A lot of organizations are building a leaner workforce, but that's before they've proven that they can actually run one. And I've got the data to back it up. Here we go.

Speaker 1:20

Ooh, fun.

Speaker 2 1:20

Yeah. I,

Speaker 1:21

I think it's connected. I think it's,

Speaker 2 1:22

I think it's good. It's connected. Isn't it all? Is it? We're all connected, man.

Work Feels Less Human By 2026

Speaker 1:26

It's all connected. So this week I read seven different articles and I just started to see trends coming across my screen. As I was going through everything that popped up last week. The big headline here is The illusion of infinite AI Productivity is gonna change how we measure employee performance, unfortunately, how we're making strategic decisions and whether our workplaces feel human at all. And the good news is we have choices, right? Yeah. We have choices.

Speaker 2 2:02

the keyword there for me is illusion. that just makes me wanna double click on that. But yeah, I'm curious.

Speaker 2:09

There's a big old illusion happening. So let's get into it. Alright. So the first headline that I read came out of Yahoo Finance, which I'm always shocked when I see Yahoo. I know. so the first headline out of Yahoo Finance said that 63% of workers say AI is gonna make the workplace feel less human in 2026. We're already seeing this, right? But this new national survey revealed that the employee's biggest fear isn't job loss. They're terrified that AI is actually eroding their human skills. Workers are worried that works do valued, automated, ultimately resembling. Just a cold, machine driven world and where do they fit into all of it? This is coming off the heels by the way, of me just watching the story out of San Francisco of an AI bot run store. There's no humans in the store. It's just run by a bot. They choose everything from the product to the sales, to everything else. But this is what workers are terrified of. Not even their job loss. Just like what is work anymore?

Speaker 2 3:08

It feels very soulless, right?

AI Threatens Critical Thinking Skills

Speaker 3:10

Yeah. They're just like, where's my meaning? Where's my impact? Where am I in all of this? They're not hearing any of that. The second headline was coming out of hr dive. They said that AI may threaten critical thinking in the workplace, which we've seen a few studies come out about this recently. The University of Bath researchers are warning that embodied knowledge, the deep expertise that we all gain, only through that hands-on real sensory work. You and I know what that is, right? Like on the job, cannot be replicated with synthetic training through AI environments. And if employees stop engaging directly with all of the work that they process to rely on just ai, that human expertise and that analytical judgment is literally going to fade away completely. Destroying our own critical thinking and innovation here, and I just wanna call out, if anyone wants a diary of a CEO, we should be concerned about this because AI models are trained on yesterday's information. So if you're an innovative company and you're relying on AI to have the solutions for you, they're already giving you old answers. So yeah, that's a problem.

Speaker 2 4:13

It's easy to see how it happens. Think a lot of us are addicted to let's just let AI run it, or let's have AI kind of start by generating ideas or let's have AI write this whole thing. Every time you do that, you're chipping away at an opportunity to get another rep in. It's like outsourcing muscle development. It's the same thing.

Trend Swap And Strategy Without Tradeoffs

Speaker 4:32

it's just commoditizing the whole instant gratification, I'm gonna keep going exactly. Because like these headlines, I'm seeing a trend. I'm seeing a trend. I

Speaker 3 4:41

like it.

Speaker 4:41

HBR put out an article last week saying researchers asked LLMs for strategic advice and they got trend swap in return. So instead of acting as unbiased sounding boards, AI models act like junior consultants who just parrot socially desirable buzzwords from the internet back to them. Even worse, they fall into the hybrid trap telling executives they can avoid hard trade offs and pursue conflicting strategies simultaneously. Which strategy scholars warn leaves a firm completely stuck in the middle of dealing with it. So HBR reported on this CNBC reported on this last week? Yeah, it's it wants you to be happy with the answers, whether those answers are right or not.

Speaker 2 5:27

The fear for me in that is that Great Strat is all about making a choice, leaving things on the cutting room floor and being incredibly decisive about it. And you can't play the middle. The middle is where you're gonna get killed

Brain Fry And Decision Fatigue

What Skilled AI Users Do

Speaker 5:40

so we've got trend slap, right? Workplaces not even resembling humanity anymore. We've got just all of these concerns. And then HBR reported that using AI actually leads to something called brain fry. So treating AI as a swarm of agents we have to constantly oversee is pushing workers to their cognitive limits. This is AI brain fry, and it's causing 33% spike in decision fatigue. A 39% increase in major workplace errors. Ironically, it's driving a 39% increase in intent to quit among top performing employees because they're exhausted from managing the tech. Now, you and I both know this is a problem because tech again, is not the only answer to everything and people are just, like, F it, I'm burning out. Agents aren't your solution to everything. Alright, the last headline, HBR, what the best AI users do differently. And how to level up your employees if you need to. I'm hearing from these other headlines though, your employees aren't really into it. But anyway despite wide adoption rates, only about 5% of workers are actually sophisticated AI users. Surprisingly, the best users aren't even tech savvy junior people, they're managers and above who are treating it not as a shortcut, but as a reasoning partner. And they are pushing back on the logic more than anyone else, defining their constraints, guiding the model better over time. They're not accepting just the initial output as face value because they're using their critical thinking'cause they've had time to develop it. So that's another issue that's happening within the organization and we've heard this all and all before, right? But altogether they're pointing to really one big signal here, which you and I have talked about multiple times now on the pod. We're mistaking cognitive convenience for actual effectiveness in the workplace. It's frying our brains. It's destroying deep thinking. It's destroying innovation

Guardrails And Asking The Right Question

Speaker 2 7:44

in AI's defense though, I find it fascinating that people that know how to manage really well and lead teams really well, are really effective AI users because they understand how to develop skill, develop intelligence. there's a couple things though, right? Yeah. the, we're not giving the agent the right management, number one. We're also, a lot of times from an OD perspective, we're not even, we're not even being surgical about the problem we're asking the AI to solve, or where in the workflow it needs to solve or reconstructing our teams. It's like we're not even clear on what the fuck the work is. It's all throwing spaghetti at the wall. So it's no wonder to me that all of these headlines are coming up because we've not been surgical and we've completely removed basic fundamentals of like management and od,

Speaker 8:33

Those are my headlines happening over here. Right now we're just in this perfect storm. We're in the perfect storm of. All of our own biological limits as human beings in dealing with this and nevermind what's happening in the world every day that folks are dealing with, right?

Speaker 3 8:48

What's the solution

Speaker 8:50

right now? The solution is asking the right question, which is what is the problem we're actually trying to solve? And is this the right solution for it? AI isn't the solution to everything, right? So couple of things for the CEO if you need more people just using the tools, that's not it. This is not an adoption problem. Right now you need to decide on the guardrails for your organization. Why are you prioritizing this? What are you prioritizing with ai? Do not use AI just to make your decisions for you If you're a team leader, you also need to have some boundaries here and what is it being used for? What are the expectations? You and I talk about this every week. I feel like I'm just repeating myself every week at this point with these headlines.

Speaker 2 9:39

I had the same issue we were talking about this last year, actually. I went back and looked, we've been talking about this is going to, people are gonna throw spaghetti at a wall. No, we've been talking about it. It's either a labor story or it's a, this is a like an unstrategic, unhuman thing, right?

Speaker 3 9:55

I think it's both.

Layoffs Driven By AI Illusions

Speaker 2 9:58

You know why? Lemme put it this way. I think there's some, what I'm bummed about, and this is, I know the work that we do with organizations too. What really sings is when you're really clear about who you are as an organization, what's not gonna change? What is your soul that is non-negotiable? What's the work. Then who's gonna do the work? That could be AI or that could be humans. And getting really clear on those things before we're even implementing tech. Because you might get to the point when you're like, what's the work? And you realize, oh, AI shouldn't be doing any of this work. What's happening is the opposite.

Speaker 10:35

It's also the story of just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Speaker 2 10:40

That's the thing.

Speaker 10:40

that's a big one. A trend. I keep hearing in outreach. To me personally, conversations that I'm overhearing or places where we've been is this concept of why are we doing this? And then the response because we don't wanna fall behind. And my question is fall behind whom? Because in this world, if you wanna be a differentiator, you need to worry about yourself, number one, and what's right for you and your organization. Everyone's using the same three LLMs, you're all getting the same output from everything. So who does that benefit that you feel like you're falling behind? Who's making you feel like you're falling behind? Everybody's in the same place right now and learning together and growing together.'cause they're all using the same three models. There's almost this concept of we're falling behind, so there's this rush. Everyone needs to use it. So we're not gonna slow down to do it right and in a meaningful way. But as a result, these are all the things that we're getting from

Speaker 2 11:44

my big concern we're making very significant decisions based on illusions.

Speaker 3 11:51

Yes.

Speaker 2 11:52

And it's not just within the work, it's also shape of your labor force, or even if you're gonna do layoffs. We're seeing it even before there's been really solid data that AI makes your teams more productive. We see studies here and there, but organizations are making massive cuts because of it. Massive cuts. The illusion is scary to me.'cause it is an illusion right now.

Speaker 12:19

Yeah. The illusion is scary. A call comes back to choices.

Labor Market Data And Mixed Productivity

Speaker 2 12:27

We talk a lot about, if your system can't hold your strategy, it's not gonna go anywhere. We see a lot of people coming up with these really beautiful strategies. We've been part of that, but then their system can't hold it the people don't have the capabilities to execute on it. Decision rights haven't been cleared, incentives aren't cleared. The supporting structure doesn't enable those behaviors to be executed. And I keep thinking about Salesforce. Salesforce did a ton of layoffs, 4,000 people clearly stating that it was because of ai. And then a week and a half ago, an article came out that Salesforce is now rehiring people because Whoopsies we freaking called that last year.

Speaker 13:11

Do you remember? We were like, we're gonna see a lot of layoffs and then a lot of rehiring.

Speaker 2 13:16

Lot of rehiring. But you saw this article, right? Where they're like, shit,

Speaker 13:19

I did. Yeah, I saw it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 13:21

And I am seeing this in a lot because of the illusion of AI productivity that we can, instead of surgically removing the mole on our arm, we're gonna chop the whole fucking thing off.

Speaker 13:33

Yeah.

Speaker 2 13:33

We're building all of these leaner workforces genic and human, sometimes just genic or just leaner humans, again, under this illusion of ai, but there's no proof that a lot of these organizations can actually run them. Casing point Salesforce right now, Oracle, guarantee you a lot of these organizations that are making these lop off huge layoff announcements are going to have to rehire because they haven't redesigned the system. There's a lot of data to support this. It's not just me pontificating on this, but just give you some data on this. Okay? So

Speaker 14:10

not just complaining.

Speaker 2 14:11

This isn't just a vibe, right? There's data behind it. Job openings are down to about 6.9 million. That's way off the peak. Hiring a slow to about 4.8 million hires a month. Again, no bueno. Quits are down. People are moving, they are staying put because there's no guarantee of another job. We've seen this and unemployment is sitting around 4.3%. That ain't good. It's not a crash, but that ain't good.

Speaker 14:37

It's not good. We're in a rough spot right now.

Where Extra Efficiency Actually Goes

Speaker 2 14:41

We're all right now just holding too. And by the way, we're holding in an environment that is very precarious. If you look at all these other forcing functions that are out there, IE the strait of her moves and inflation and a whole bunch of other things that cause massive uncertainty economically. If one of those things gets worse we might see even more layoffs coming because uncertainty is not good for jobs. right now companies are not aggressively cutting yet. But they're also not adding. And that's the first signal that growth is no longer automatically tied to headcount. And that's a first right? For a long time if you needed to grow, you needed bodies. That was the playbook. What's interesting is when you add this AI layer in, there's this idea that people are way more productive. Now, about 18% of companies are saying they've adopted AI already, when you zoom out, the Fed does not know how this is gonna impact the economy yet. Some studies are showing gains, some are showing no impact at all in some show experience. People getting slower because they're double checking outputs or they're getting slop or they're managers that are getting borrowed down, just like you talked about, Mel, right? It's the verdict is out on this productivity piece. Here's the part that gives me pause, because even with mixed evidenced and mixed signals and people getting burnt out, and people that we know not redesigning their systems companies are already acting like they need fewer people. We're seeing things like hiring freezes in certain roles, layoffs while increasing AI investment. We see that all of the time. Look at any major layoff right now, what they're citing is investment in the future in tech spend, and they're using that payroll gain to support that tech spend. That is the number one reason we're seeing right now. Most of the people that I talk to in management levels right now are saying they have way more people underneath them and they have more in their scope of work as well. So there, there are two sides to this story right now that kind of, they don't tickle me, but I'm just like. What? Oh, basically we're making workforce decisions based on what people think is coming. Let's go back to that illusion. We just proved that though, but there's another piece that I'm seeing, let's say people are using it and they are becoming more efficient. Then my question is, what are companies actually doing with that extra efficiency? Because I have yet to hear that story. There's no real redesign of rules or incentives or workflows. So where does the extra capacity go?

Speaker 17:28

Yeah, where is it going And how has that brought value to your business, to your customers? Where are those stories?

Speaker 2 17:35

Agree. We're not seeing a reinvestment, we're not seeing redirection. It seems like it's going right now towards if that is happening, more tasks, higher expectations, more noise. We're making these decisions under the illusion. Even if we are getting what was promised from it, I don't think most organizations know what to do with it. And so it comes back to this age old question of why, because right now it doesn't seem like we're short on capacity at all. I feel like we're short on really thinking about the design of this.

Speaker 3 18:09

100%.

Speaker 2 18:11

The question I would have for folks is, if you're thinking about pulling an AI or using AI instead of an FTE or if you're giving the promise of productivity gains for your people, are you clear on what you are expecting them to do with that extra capacity? And if it is just doing more work of the same

Speaker 18:35

Wrong move.

Speaker 2 18:36

Yeah.

Speaker 18:38

Kind of wrong. Wrong move.

Speaker 2 18:40

this is my bummer with ai. This actually could be so magical and wonderful and like really push people into new realms. It really could. It could, but we've reduced it to just cheap labor place. Yeah.

Speaker 18:56

Yes. Instead of actual, like leaning into our creativity, our critical thinking, using that regained efficiency to double down on those things. That's not happening. And if it is, please call us.'cause we'd love to feature what you're doing. But yeah,

Speaker 2 19:12

percent,

Speaker 19:12

at least we've been around, we have conversations every week, all week. We're not seeing that yet. We haven't heard that story yet.

Speaker 2 19:19

No.

Speaker 3 19:20

No. And it's

Speaker 2 19:20

I would love to hear a story about how a company started slow solving real problems. Gave people more space. They actually had the space to do more. Complex creative work that actually pushed an organization into new business lines, pushed people into greater abundance. It just feels like a really basic efficiency flight. What is the difference between difference and offshoring?

Speaker 19:55

Good question. Excellent question. I think you have to say no to the illusion. I think if you find yourself even muttering the phrase as a response to, what are we doing this for? Because we don't wanna fall behind you gotta stop yourself in your tracks right there. If those words come out of your mouth, that's the wrong answer that's not a viable response. that's a lazy response. It's gotta be, we're doing this because it's going to do this for our business. It's going to do this for our customers. It's gonna do this for the people that are here. And if you can't answer those questions, that's the real issue. Not because we're gonna fall behind to some false illusion that you're already behind something. Nobody's behind Everyone's building and learning together right now.

Speaker 2 20:54

You and I both know there are organizations planning on making major cuts on that illusion.

Speaker 21:00

On that illusion though. They don't wanna fall behind

Speaker 2 21:04

One of the things that I think about a lot we've had futurists on the PI and one of them said that the biggest organization in the future will probably be about 50 people. And I have never been able to get that out of my mind. But when I hear these stories about we're afraid to be left behind, and when I hear people lobbing off huge chunks of their organization on the illusion of ai, you can very quickly see, oh, is this how we get here? That the only people left in the organizations are the owners? And That's what really scares me.

Speaker 21:39

What scares me about that too is although, private businesses can run their business however they feel like it, right? Within the laws and legislation that's out there. But at the same time, like if you have anywhere on your website, and this is just my little soapbox, so do it, do

Speaker 2 21:55

it's our show. Hey, our pod, whatever. This

Speaker 21:57

is the humanist in me,

Speaker 2 21:59

Francesca and Mel Bitch about me.

Speaker 22:02

I think it could be so magical. It bums me out too. Its me because I'm just man, we just have an opportunity here to actually pause at the right moment and turn this ship around.

Speaker 3 22:11

Yeah.

Speaker 22:12

And are we gonna take the moment? Are we gonna take it? But I'm just wondering for the businesses that are out there what kind of society do you wanna create? Because whether you like it or not, you employ communities and when you let go of. 5,000, 30,000. All these communities become like the next Detroit potentially. And to this day, still trying to rebuild from that so what future society are you building?

Speaker 2 22:46

that's an incredibly important question and I would love more people to make the analogy around AI and jobs. Not around the analogy around 2008 or 2001, I want you to make the analogy of when jobs completely disappear. So give me Detroit, give me Bethlehem Steel. Give me Bridgeport, Connecticut. Give me the garment district in New York. When jobs go away, what happened to those communities? What did the government do? What did those people do? And to your very good point, some of those cities are just starting to recover. But there are indelible scars that are left. Watch a movie called Roger and Me. It's a Michael Moore movie, but it will give you a very clear example of what happens when jobs disappear.

Speaker 23:40

Yeah. I know we're not trying to be doomsdayers folks. Like we see the headlines every week. Literally. This is what we do.

Speaker 2 23:50

But to your point, these are things to decide. you can keep employees as an organization. You can decide that.

Speaker 23:56

Yeah, you can decide do you know enough to pull that lever to say it was for ai? Do you have the numbers to really back it up, a bold move today would be like, we're not doing any AI layoffs because we need to see results before we can actually make any decisions on what our future workforce looks like. That's a bold move in today's market

Speaker 2 24:20

I think it takes one company, and it usually is a company that comes out like this Phoenix rising from the ash, right? But when Google started getting pr, it was like, oh, it's this whole different way to work. I know it's all trite right now, but ping pong tables and snacks and all of these. Yeah. Oh my God. You can get drycleaning nap

Speaker 24:38

pods.

Speaker 2 24:39

Yeah. And like it was like, what? What do you mean amenities? What do you mean they can wear jeans to work? I'm using it as an example because it usually takes somebody making a bold move around, this is our new way of working that really maximizes quote unquote human potential. Google did that beautifully. Everybody else followed suit. I'm waiting for that company. I think that company will come. Me

Speaker 25:06

too.

Policy Fixes And Better Incentives

Speaker 2 25:06

And it's an incredible brand opportunity. And when I say brand, I mean you are authentically this and you're getting the good earned media for it. It's a huge opportunity for a company ride that way for 10 years. Easy. Let's go.

Speaker 25:22

I know. I can't wait for that story. What society do you wanna really be building for the future? If you have kids, put it into perspective as a human being and not the role that you have. What future are you wanting to build? Because your choices within that organization are gonna bleed out into the communities that you live in. And that's a real thing.

Speaker 2 25:44

What is the one thing you think needs to change? if you could wave a magic wand and say, this is the one thing that I think would make this a thousand times better, what would it be?

Speaker 26:00

I think there needs to be legislation around AI layoffs. You need to actually prove something that you're either creating a certain level of job, there's gotta be some proof point there that you can justify that level of impact to local. Communities with your decision, because when you think of the impact of a layoff at an organization, Oracle, what was it? 30,000 people? Oh,

Speaker 3 26:27

Yeah.

Speaker 26:27

30,000 people for, that's more than a town. So when someone's making that level, like there needs to be certain thresholds around layoffs at this point.

Speaker 2 26:40

It's interesting, we have it on the front end, like where counties, cities states, give tax abatements for companies to come in because it creates jobs, why aren't we doing it on the back end? I love that. I would love to see, and I know it's never gonna happen, but I think something that is just killing everyone is earnings, needs to go to either. Bi-annually or annually, we're making quarter by quarter decisions. When people say we're getting left behind, they're making sometimes cut decisions just to falsely boost their numbers I love your idea around, the government supports the government justification for layoffs. I think that's huge. I would also love for our incentive structure on making some of these decisions to go a little bit more long term. The short-term thinking to me is killing us

Speaker 27:40

100%.

Speaker 2 27:41

It begs a very interesting question. Without those things, how much further can we get?

Speaker 6 27:46

If you haven't been listening for a while or you're catching up, or you're new here, we launched a newsletter, if you want one. Meaty insight driven email a month where we share frameworks that you can implement for yourself, for your team, for your org Sign up over on your work friends.com. And you can listen to the pod. Every Tuesday we drop new episodes. So check it out and subscribe. Leave us your feedback and reach out to us at friend@yourworkfriends.com. Bye.