Had that work efficiency session at the start of the week and I think I figured something out about why AI has been such a top down push in the workplace.

A member of the global leadership team was in the sessions, and she’s all in on AI. She was telling us about all the work she was getting done with it, and it was just things like reports, presentations, communications plans, and risk strategies.

It’s all just typing up a bunch of stuff that gets turned into PDFs and sits on the company Sharepoint. She’s at a high enough level now she’s not working on any of the implementation, so you can use AI to just write everything for you.

Really, you could probably download templates for all these documents and change the details specific to your business. It would be much better for the environment, but these people wouldn’t feel like they’re doing anything meaningful if they’re just playing corporate madlibs.

I could use AI in a bit of my work, but I need to make Facebook ads, emails, and manage a website. AI can’t do any of that, it’s just an elaborate autocomplete.

And it’s telling the perspective on AI is ‘Look at all this amazing work I’m getting done with AI’ and not ‘The iPhone autocomplete can do my job faster than me, what’s the point of my job?’

One of my only applicable use cases was a business case document. Copilot just wrote the most boring version of an SEO friendly article on Viva Engage, and even then I felt I had to step in and write some things myself to both make it more interesting and specific to the business. And say this goes ahead, AI can’t put people into Viva Engage groups for me.