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We’re not just working with AI.

We’re hiding behind it.

Offices are quiet. Team chats feel fake. And people would rather ask a bot than a coworker.

Microsoft says we’re choosing AI to avoid judgment.

But if no one talks, what happens to trust, mentorship, and actual teamwork?

In this episode, we cover:

✅ Why AI is becoming your emotional escape plan

✅ The silent collapse of workplace culture

✅ What “efficient” really costs long-term

✅ How leaders can fix the mess they helped create

No sugarcoating. No hype. Just the uncomfortable truth about the future of work.

👇 Comment: Has AI helped—or hurt—your team?

Subscribe if you’re tired of pretending Slack messages = connection.

➡️ Go ahead and hit that like button!

Welcome to the Make Work Not Suck podcast.

Ryan, imagine working in an office where your closest coworker has no pulse. Microsoft, just just came out with a new report that says we're increasingly choosing AI over humans for workplace interactions. Is this just efficiency, or have we started, the workplace apocalypse?

Today's topic's gonna be fantastic. Yeah. We're gonna unpack why workers would rather deal with chatbots than Brenda down the hall. I don't know what people have against Brenda down the hall, but they rather talk to chat g p t than Brenda. You know, exploring radical shifts towards AI driven workplaces, the good, the bad, and the potentially dangerous, and laying out what leaders and employees need to know about introducing AI into the workplace.

Alright. So let's start with a crazy stat. Almost one in five workers today use AI specifically because they don't wanna be judged by their coworkers. So let me ask you, Ryan, when was the last time you chose AI because you didn't wanna ask a human?

Oh, honestly, it was like yesterday.

Okay. Tell me. Because for me, it was this morning. So I wanna hear your story.

Oh, okay. I might throw myself under the bus. It was also this morning too. I I think it's one of those it's almost become second nature

Mhmm.

To chat GPT for an answer for something than going to a colleague. Like, it's one of those I use chat GPT so much during the day. Like, which one was legitimate to I should have asked a human, and the other one was should have asked, AI. And I think one that in particular I'm thinking of is instead of going to a developer to ask a piece of code, I literally went to ChatCPT and told you know, ask ChatCPT to review the code, tell me what's wrong with it, how could it be improved. And then I just went and made the change as opposed to, you know, challenging the developer.

I just did it with chat and just totally cut the human out of the middle.

Yeah. So today, I was meeting with one of my clients. She's a physician, you know, health care, and was talking about AI using AI in part of her practice. And so she's like, I've got I've got an AI guy. And I was like, okay.

And so she puts him on speaker phone, and we're sitting there at the table, and she's wanting to ask him some questions. So while we're on speaker phone, I'm on chat GPT typing away her situation. Right? It's this kind of practice, this kind of this, this kind of this, just entering all the the parameters in that I can. I wanna do this.

How would I do that? And it just goes and just spits out, you know, like a 10 step process. And I was like, oh, by the way, this is health care. I need to be HIPAA compliant. They're all on Microsoft.

How would that change your advice? And then here's, Hey, I haven't ever done this before. Where should I start? Here's a, you know, for dummies. And I was just like, and I turned the screen around.

I was like, why are we talking to your friends? Like, no disrespect, but like, here's the baby steps. Like, you don't have to have a high school degree to follow these steps. And it tells you exactly what you need to do. And she was just like, it can do that.

And I was like, it is unbelievable what this can do. And the guy, you know, I was kind of listening in. He's a nice guy. I'm sure he's very talented, but he didn't even have all the context. And so what he the question that he was trying to answer is not even the right question.

Not even asking the right question. So you basically went to ChatCPT over the human?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Because I I think part part of my reason for this, and I would love to hear yours, ChatGPT or, you know, any of the other ones, they give such a thorough answer, and they kind of declare their assumptions. Right? So we're trying to optimize for this.

And here's why we said this. They give me so much context that I can then edit and be like, oh wait, that's not quite right. Oh, I forgot to tell you this part. They, they, it's almost, they show me their work, not fully, but I didn't get that from the guy. The guy was like, oh yeah, you should probably use this technology.

That would be good. I was like, man, there's, there's a 100 things I haven't had a chance to tell you yet. How in the world are you giving me a recommendation when you haven't even really understood the problem we're working with? And the back and forth that I can do with a chat GPT, they show me their work and then I can edit and we get better faster than working with a human. Because most humans just wanna, like, I wanna give you an a good answer quickly so you think I'm awesome.

The quality of the answer is TBD.

Yeah. I think I'd challenge you on that a little bit because, like, I think ChatTCT and some of the others, they give you almost a false sense of hope unless you understand what you're working on or working with. Mhmm. If you don't have the context of what's going, he may be right. He may be able to get you a solution because he's an expert, been doing this for ten, fifteen, twenty years, and you're trusting ChatTPT because it's giving you context, but it could be giving you the wrong advice.

It totally could be. That's a fair point. That's fair.

And so I think it's I think this is where the the spicy take here. Right? We're not using AI to better to be better teammates. We're using it to ghost each other. It's corporate Casper.

I mean, if you think about it, when you go to that, instead of going to the expert or the individual, you're trusting the AI bot, which don't get me wrong, it's pretty good. But, like, are we taking it for face value?

Yeah. I think it's it's an interesting point that you have to know enough about the question you're asking to know if the response is in the right ballpark because there is a lot of false confidence that it communicates. And if you don't know what you're doing, you could easily be allowed straight. And honestly, I'm in this conversation, I'm a little out of my depth, and I probably should have written down the technology he told me to use. God had done a little extra research.

It seems obvious to me why asking an AI is so popular because it doesn't really judge me. Right? I can be honest, say, hey, I don't know what I'm talking about here. And it's not going to judge me or shame me or tell my coworkers that, hey, you know, so and so doesn't even know how to form a spreadsheet. But it does make me wonder what happens to organizations if over time we continue to go to AI instead of going to other people, right, going to going to our coworkers for collaboration.

What do you think this is going to do to the skills that we really need? Right? The skills of how do you work together if you're always interacting with Claude? How are you ever gonna work learn to work with other people?

Two sides of that.

Okay.

I do think we as a society still are very human face to face focused. Right? Mhmm. So we've got our friends we hang out with, we, you know, go to dinner with, we travel with, we do all that stuff. So I think there's still a level of we get our social interaction still, but the question is is how much do we become a teammate within the work environment, and the work environment's competitive.

And so there's a there's an emotional component of this, and I think that's where the you know, are you choosing emotional safety over actual collaboration? I mean, we're turning offices into self-service kiosk with each person privately using AI rather than collaborating openly. I mean, think about that for a second. If you're literally using chat TPT to be your coworker, which I'm guilty as charged in some of the stuff I do Mhmm. Then I'm not collaborating openly.

Yeah. There's greater speed.

Right.

But it's terrible if you actually need to build trust. And and what happens in crisis? Like, a major project's delayed or product recall or when real collaboration and trust are critical. Will people even know how to come together, or will they just prompt their digital receptionist or sorry, digital therapist? Digital receptionist or digital therapist, either one.

Hey. Wait.

What are you gonna do

ChatCPT can be both.

Well well, are you gonna go to ChatCPT and and go, my project's being delayed. What do I do? Well, you need to call the customer and tell them the project's delayed. You need to tell your boss. Okay.

Can you write an email for me to send to my boss?

Mhmm.

Like, that sounds fine in theory, and it sped it up, but you still have to have that social, you know, interaction, that collaboration.

Yeah. I'm trying to think about how would you do a retrospective with an AI bot. Right? Like, what happens if everyone's just interacting with AI and something goes wrong? Do we actually have the skills at that point to solve our problems, to learn from each other, to address conflict in a healthy way, learn and get better from it, if we're all just isolated and interacting with our AI in a, you know, digital self serve kiosk.

I mean, we're I'm hearing this from from my clients. I'm hearing that people under the age of 25 don't know how to interact with other human beings. They don't know how to have hard conversations. They don't know how to handle conflict. They don't know how to hold people accountable.

They like, just fundamental management skills aren't there because they're digital natives that grew up texting, not talking eyeball to eyeball, and and now they're in a workplace, and they don't have their devices because they're on the clock and they don't know how to interact with one another. They don't know how to say, Hey, can you go do this? I'll do this. And Hey, you didn't do that right. But like those skills aren't there.

They're having to build those skills into these young workers because they don't have the social skills required to succeed in that was a quick service restaurant example, but I can't imagine it's gonna be much better in an office environment.

Yeah. I I don't know. I'm on the fence with the younger generation. I I agree with what you said, but I think there's also a gap. Because I do think the younger generation to some degree is actually more collaborative and communicative.

But I think it's done more intellectually. It's done more, like, through, you know, Discord and over the Internet and chat, text messages. And, like, both my my sons and a lot of their friends, like, they have more chat groups on their cell phone than I do, and they're, like, super chatty on it. At the same time, you know, how many times did any of them actually make a phone call and talk to the person on the other side? Now they still hang out with their friends, and I see this in in the young twenties, workers in the different, companies I work with.

They're very social within their circles, but I think it's the generational gap is where they rather they rather talk to people at their level than talk to their managers and bosses. So I don't think it's it's a I don't think it's a matter of them not being afraid to be social. I think it's the generational gaps or the generational, interdependencies where we rather talk to chat GPT than the the older gentleman down the hall because he doesn't work the way I do. I think that's the real crux of it. I think there's another component of it as well.

I think, you know, I I watched the team nearly implode, and this was without AI. But think about the same scenario with AI, and this happened literally this week.

Okay.

Is they're so IQ focused that they're literally ramrodding things through and pushing for results and results at the expense of reality. And the team's kind of fallen off the rails, and and the owner's getting frustrated, and the leadership team's frustrated. And and this is without using AI. And part of it is where where the AI comes into the equation is you've got the visionary in the business prompting AI. What do I need to do this?

Okay. It's easy. You just need to get this done. We are telling skilled people how to do their job as a leader. Like, you're literally

not gonna go that's not gonna go so well for you.

Yeah. Instead of instead of working with the leader and saying, what is it gonna take to do this? How do we overcome this problem? They're using chat CPT to to basically solve what they think is the problem, and then they're telling their leaders, like, it's easy. Go do this.

Hey, ChatGPT. Can you write an email to my managers to tell them that they suck and do better? Thanks.

It's more like I want this job done or no. It's it's more like I need to solve this complex solution. Give me the solution. Copy and paste. Hey.

It's only gonna take you five minutes to implement the solution. No. Like, the underlying components of this that chat DPT doesn't give you is you just gave them two weeks worth of work on top of the two weeks worth of work that they gotta do in the two weeks.

They already had going for them.

You just had an expectation it's gonna get done in five minutes. And I think then you compound that with older visionary, younger team, and then I wanna communicate.

Yeah. It's almost like we're creating this culture of grind, isolation, self preservation, and I think it's just driving people crazy.

Well and, you know, Americans, we are grinders.

Oh, yeah.

You look at the European workforce, and they are much better about taking time off and shutting down and and self help and mental care and all that versus here in The US. We are just absolute grinders, grinders, grinders.

Yeah. The part that I'm the part that I'm most worried about, and I'm not sure where's the right part to insert this, so I'll just jump into this now. I know that I have experienced at times in my career what is just overly, that overly used word synergy. Right? As a consultant, we we love the word synergy.

We can use it for just about anything. But in the purest sense of the word, I have I have been on those teams where you've got the right people in the right seats with the right level of trust, clear vision, like all of those things working together. And it's almost like there's a there's another person in the room. Right? There's, like, the four of you and then this fifth thing that's just the magic, the the special sauce.

Right? And that's very rare, but it is magical when it happens. And I don't know with AI becoming more and more a part of work every day for just about everyone, like it's, are those magical moments still gonna happen? And that's my concern is that I, they might not be frequent, but they're so impactful. What do you think?

Because, are those are those moments more or less likely to happen if everyone's tied into their chatbot.

So I'm gonna give you a couple real world examples here.

Okay.

Fully throw myself under the bus. So I'm working with this guy on this this software startup. You know, he's got this great idea, and it's like, alright. I can I can develop this? I literally popped my laptop up on the kitchen counter one Saturday morning, and I pulled, you know, chat GPT up and clawed up, and I'm like, go into town.

Mhmm. You know, the the the buzzy word now is vibe coding. Just vibe coding this thing. And after about four hours, I just cranked out what would normally, as a developer, would take me two to three weeks by the time I wrote it, bug tested it, etcetera. And I did it in about four hours.

Mhmm.

End to end. I mean, the infrastructure, you know, getting this stuff on CloudFlare, getting it deployed on Docker. I mean, just the whole full stack, the code, everything using multiple language, etcetera. Man, I was high fiving chat g p t after that four hours. I was, like, pumped up.

Hell, yeah. I can't believe I just pulled this off, like, this is insane. And I'm in my kitchen, like, who do I high five here? There's no one here to high five. And when I'm like, Chad, we just did it, like, for fun.

Like, this is a stupid thing. I'm like, Chad, we just nailed it, man. This was awesome. Sid, great job. I'm glad we could work together like this man.

Alright. So practical takeaway number one. Every executive who encourages their team to use AI in their work needs to set up some sort of a physical a mannequin in their office that has the name written on the chest of their AI bot, right, whether it's ChatTPT or Claude or, you know, whoever it is, I don't care. Right? But but give him the generic name so that people can go and high five him when he gives them the right answer.

I like that. Yeah. You need you need the AI bot HighFiver in the car. Okay. I like that.

Yes. Of

course. This is gonna get weird if you're, like, sending mannequins to people's houses. It's all remote. But my point is is, like, it was a win, and my Highfive was a chatbot. Self Highfive?

Yeah. I mean, it was. Now I'm in admittedly, when I messaged the dude that I'm working on this on and and, you know, we had a conversation about it, and he was doing his part. So we did have some you know, it it allowed me to elevate my skills, and then he got it. But he he didn't he's not a developer.

He didn't understand the the gravity of what was just done. He was like, man, that's cool.

Right.

So it's almost like a little bit of letdown. On the flip side of that, same project, fast forward two weeks, I'm pissed off at chat g p t because it's lost its freaking mind, because I've gone too far through the the memory, and we've gone through too many rabbit trails. And so I'm trying to reset, and all of a sudden, it's just dropping code. It's just forgetting, like, you know, two prompts ago, we made this change, and then it gave me the new block of code, and then it's, like, dropping it. And I'm literally, like, messaging it, like, what's effing wrong with you?

Why do you keep dropping?

It's like, my apologies. You're right. You did. But then but then the next in the next instance, it does it again, and I'm like, I wanna fire you. Like, I'm just gonna go old school, and I'm just gonna write this myself.

And that's what I did. But it's one of those, like, there's so much there's there's just you can't have that connection, like you said, that's almost magical with it. And and it was void. It was empty on the other side of it. And on the flip side, the frustration, I had no one to work through the problem with when AI was not delivering results.

Well, I mean, what I did is then I went to Claude, then I had Claude and, you know, chat g p t going against each other.

Right.

That was useless. I mean but but I think about like, this is going on inside companies. I mean, there's there's leadership teams I've worked with where they're literally instead of collaborating with me when we're trying to solve a complex problem, they're like, well, did you chat did you prompt Chat GPT to give you the answer on this, that, and the other? You know, we built this workflow. I'm like, yeah.

I did, but I need to talk about it. Well, give me the output of what chat did, and then I'll figure it out. Like, no. No. I I wanna I wanna work on this.

Right.

We're we're shortcutting the culture side of the equation. Yeah. Just to pedal faster? For what?

Yeah. I think in the long run, the things that I am most proud of in my career have been difficult challenges that I have overcome with a team of people. If I simply overcome them, but there isn't a team in it with me struggling with me. I honestly, I just don't think I'm going to remember those. Like, I'm sure they've happened, but they're not as meaningful as doing it together.

Well, we're we're kinda hitting a little bit back on one of our previous episodes about, being remote.

Right. In

a remote environment, which I am with a lot of these companies I work with, it's a lot easier it's it's actually really hard to have those wins Mhmm. Because we're all remote. And so it is a lot easier to go to the AI bot, especially when I'm waiting for an answer on, you know, somewhat for someone on Slack. You know, I'm I'm in central time, and they're in Pacific time. And, you know, it's six in the morning for them.

It's like, I can get a faster answer from chat.

Right.

And so I think even even having the remote environments, you're kinda supplementing the culture with ChatGPT only forcing further the disconnect. Right. I mean, you're already having a culture problem with remote companies. Are we making it worse by using AI in remote environment?

I think there's a very significant risk that we are going to make remote work worse with introduction of more and more AI to to the work experience. I think if you're not doing something very intentional to combat that, the gravity is going to pull it towards a really isolating experience, and it's going to have a very bad effect on your culture. So speaking of culture, let's let's kind of walk through the the the framework and think about this rapid increase in the use of AI in your everyday work. What's that gonna do to the Vision Journey Culture results of work? So let's start with vision.

Can you inspire an AI? Right? Like, if does does the AI want to make the world a better place?

Can you inspire an AI artificially?

It can pretend like it's inspired.

I was ready to throw my laptop out the window on how inspired AI was for my vision, and it was like it wasn't grasping the concept of what we were trying to do. So I I you can erroneously inspire AI, but not meaningfully.

I think vision doesn't become less important though in a world of AI. Right? AI is a mercenary. It's it's there to do the job. It's not there because it's inspired.

It's not there because it believes what you believe. It's there because it's paid to be there. But in that case, you still gotta be really clear about what you're trying to accomplish, or you've just got mercenaries running around doing whatever they want. And that's a, that's an even worse place to be. So I think vision actually remains just as important, perhaps even becomes more important for you to be even clearer about what you're trying to accomplish.

Maybe not so much the why, because I don't know how much the AI mercenary cares about the why your people care. However many are left. But if you're not really clear on, on what you're trying to build in the future, you want to see. There's a very strong chance that AI is gonna take you off the rails.

Oh, thousand percent. I mean, I think this then goes into the journey aspect of it. Right? Mhmm. Are younger employees losing the chance to watch senior colleagues handle nuance and friction or failures?

Like, what does mentorship look like in a company that's run by agents?

Not good. I mean, I think about the people that have been influential in my career, and they they took a personal interest in me. They they cared about me as a person. They wanted to know how I was doing and what was happening in my personal life over the weekend. I mean, you can get a chat bot to ask you those questions, but it doesn't mean it's going to care about the answers.

I, I think that there is always some level of human connection that we are going to long for. I think in many parts of the world, human connection is going to become a premium. It's going to become a luxury good. It's something that if you can afford to pay for it, you can get fantastic service from a human being. And the rest of us are just gonna have to deal with robots.

But I think in the workplace as well, people are going to want to have personal interactions because there's a lot of meaning and purpose and connection there that I don't think the AI is ever gonna be able to replace.

Yeah. But let's let's go the other side of that. Like, are we are we full of ourselves? And reality is, like, human connections aren't gonna go away. Like, the workplace is is not the only place we have for human connection.

Is it more like it's just our human we're just gonna evolve into more of a you know, the entertainment and pleasures of life that we do in our free time is gonna be where our human interactions are, and it you know, work's just gonna come absolutely siloed. There's a flip side to that because if you spend roughly a third of your life working, then is it, like are we just gonna have, like, a lopsided scale?

Isn't this pretty much the premise of the show, Severance?

You know, I shouldn't admit this, but I've never watched it, so I don't know.

I haven't either. But I think that's the premise is that your work life and your personal life are completely disconnected, and you have no consciousness of the other. Yes. You could do that. I think companies could succeed to some extent without really fostering human interaction in their organizations.

However, nobody's gonna want to work there. Like like like you're not gonna win the war on talent. The most talented people are gonna want to work with other talented people. They're going to want to be challenged by their coworkers and by the environment. Now, the people that are just there to get a paycheck.

Sure. Probably that's that's what their life is going to be. They're not going to get a lot of that human interaction. So, so maybe workplace interaction becomes like a luxury good. The best get it because they can, and everybody else just interacts with robots.

I think now you're talking about a different dystopian movie where, like, everybody lives in the thing that hovers above the Earth and all the non elitist live in the thing, you know, on earth that is, you know I mean, you could go several different directions with this. But in the sense of I mean, even in I don't wanna say third world countries, but, you know, second world, where they still are heavily culture dependent. Mhmm. I I think what you could potentially see is a shift in in strength and power. Not not like political power or anything like that.

But, I mean, you just might see more interconnected, cultures because they're lagging behind on the technology side where I think you might see the more western worlds that are further advanced. You're just gonna have more, you know, disconnected cultures Yeah. In the

workplace. I do think that there's a risk here in this conversation of breaking this into a binary when it's really more of a continuum. Right? I think it's easy. And I've I think I've even done this in this conversation of, like, it's all AI and all robots, and and we're all plugged into the matrix, or there's no AI and we're, all Amish farmers rejecting technology.

Right? Like, I don't think either of those is the likely outcome. Alright. I think the outcome is is more of a blend. Right.

So are you being mentored by an AI bot? No, probably not. But what is likely is your mentor has access to an AI bot that knows a lot about you and says, Hey, here's Ryan. Here's how Ryan thinks. Here's the way that Ryan views the world.

Here's his personality assessment. Here's his blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's the best way to communicate that to Ryan for him to hear and receive it. And so there's almost maybe your mentor has an AI coach that's helping him be a better mentor to you rather than you being mentored by the AI bot itself.

True. I think I think in this in the statement of of what the the the journey one here was is I think it's less about having a mentor, like, as an actual coach or therapist type, but more like the the soft skills that you can't or hard skills. I forget which one. But it's the skills you you you can only learn on the job. I'll I'll use the example of welding.

AI is probably not replacing a welder's job, but a robot will. But if you're a welder and you're teaching somebody, it's more like you're learning, like, the different angles and speed and the rates of the wire feed or the amount of gas if you're using a gas welder versus a a MIG welder or not a stick welder. You know, there's always different variables that, yeah, you can read in the textbook, but you're just gonna get this real world example. Mhmm. That I think the same thing holds true in the professional world, like a a a customer success agent.

Being along on calls along someone that can manage difficult customers. Like, ChatGPT can give you a prompt to handle a difficult customer. But what happens when the customer takes a left turn? And, of course, then you get into the paradigm of, like, well, maybe it's their chatbot talking to your chatbot, and the two chatbots are having a conversation as opposed to two humans.

But Right.

I think, like, that's I think when we're talking about the the mentorship within the workplace, it's more like those skills that you can only learn from those that know how to do the job and have done the job. Mhmm. And I think that is where we start losing it when AI starts taking place, kind of replacing that mentorship within the company.

Yeah. Well, to your point about coaching,

I mean, I mean, I used chat CPT earlier today. I was on a or no. This was yesterday. I was on a one on one with an individual, and I like this book, you know, The Coaching Habit. Mhmm.

And I was like, okay. There's something in this book. There's a part in this book. I can't remember where it's at. I need to say it in this coaching call.

Opened up chat GPT, said I'm I'm in this book, there's this phrase. I need this thing. I need to give it to this person. Bam. It said it's on this page.

It's here's the phrase. Wow. And then I turned around and said, okay. Give me three questions I can prompt this person to, you know, help with grading this. Oh, those are good.

Throw it out on the on the coaching call. Like, again, AI is a great tool to speed things up, but he wasn't having a coaching call with the AI. He was having a coaching call with me, and I was using the AI Sure.

Because you knew what to look for. I knew what to look for. Right. So we're kinda getting into the culture side. Right?

Vision journey culture. I do think that there is a risk of outsourcing difficult conversations. And to your point, there's a lot of things that can only be learned on the job. How are people going to learn complexity? How to handle conflict?

Like, where's where's that going to be learned if if we're having less and less human to human interactions?

So I think this is the importance of maintaining those collaborative meetings. I think when you can draw the line between, you know, this is an AI task versus getting people on a call. I'll give you a perfect example. This was a headline on an l 10 I was on just before we recorded this episode. And I put the headline as we had a big clash on this, team meeting we had the previous day.

And on the previous day, it actually was, like, we intentionally it was iron sharpens iron. It wasn't like we had the duking mats, and we were throwing names at each other. But it was legitimately us trying to solve a problem, And me and the other VP were were really challenging each other with part of our direct reports on this call. It was a team Mhmm. Her team, my team, on this call together, the more senior members of the team.

But you had these two or you had there was four or five different individuals on this call besides there are six people, two direct reports from each side. They're watching these two senior leaders clash

Mhmm.

To solve a problem, and that if we would have gone to AI, we never would have shown that. We never would have come to resolution, and AI can only do retrospectively at the moment. I mean, I can give you some fore thinking stuff. But we're trial we're we're solving complex problems that nobody actually knows the right answer to and gets into, like, the dichotomy of leadership. Right?

Like, AI can't tell you the perfect solution. It can only give you guidance. Somebody still has to make the decision.

Right.

So trying to find the right decision, the two leaders were challenging each other for the benefit of the company, and then got the junior leaders on the same page, and then there was collaboration. It was a headline today that we had a difficult conversation, collaborated, and had a win. I think this is where it's important. The culture aspect of this is leaders to lead the culture and understand where to push the culture to drive complex problems and where AI should just do daily task work.

Yeah. I think that's really good. I think the the risk is if that had not been done in public or it had been done over Slack or had been done by, you know, your AI bot fighting his AI bot, they're up they would not have had the opportunity to learn how do professionals, how do professional leaders disagree and commit. Right? And that is hard.

Like that's, there's not a lot of good examples of people doing that well, and the AI can't coach you through that. So I I think that those are the kinds of moments that are at risk in the future because if people are hiding behind their keyboards and hiding behind their AI, they're they're not keeping those skills fresh, and they're not training other people in those skills. And I think those are the kinds of things that are gonna get lost in organizations that go all in on AI to the expense of the culture. Yep. Alright.

Results. Jeez. So I'm seeing across industries a lot of efficiency gains. Meta says it's gonna lay off half of its engineering team because it's going to be doing all of the coding is going to be written by AI. So near term, I think there's a lot of efficiency gains for the companies.

But what about longer term? Five, ten years from now, are are these organizations sustainable if they get rid of half of their people and replace them with AI bots. Is is that really sustainable?

So what what's interesting is we had this conversation. This was part of the the heated conversation the other

day. Mhmm.

Is it's a media company. We had, we're we're looking at Meta Andromeda. It's a program Meta's putting out there to analyze people's ads to help get them in the right audience. It's got physical hardware connected to it. It's their entire, like, AI model built to streamline the the media buying process.

And so what we're talking about is literally how this meta decision is going to change how digital marketing agencies like, do you need skilled media buyers? Like, what skill do you need? What do you no. And I think when it came down to it is there's in in a level of, like, a task doer versus kind of, like, a tactical, you know, level than a higher than a task, but not quite strategy into the strategy. What we really realized is, like, that whole middle layer is gonna go away.

And it's just gonna be, like, strategy and and tact execution because the AI does the tactical in the

middle. Interesting. So I think You wouldn't you wouldn't think the AI would take the tactical at the bottom of it as well?

Someone still has to do the the it could, but someone still has to do some of the the let's call it the prompting to the AI to do that. Okay. So it's it's more like the middle, like, middle management kinda goes away, because it's just not needed because these AI systems and tools and the evolution of the algorithms and platforms don't you don't need that level anymore. You just feed creative in, you give it money, you give it data, creative, and money, and it figures the rest out for you.

Right.

You know, versus the days of flipping all the little switches and different campaigns and this, that, and the other, which is what that middle layer did, just not needed anymore. But Wow. What it's gonna drive is it'll increase results, but it's gonna put the importance of that higher level strategy person.

Mhmm.

Understanding the client, working with the client. Like, it's actually gonna force more potentially. If you did it entire AI, you're you're probably gonna you could get some good results. But I think going back into what the thing says here, like, is it gonna be a workplace without, you know, real interpersonal is it actually sustainable? The way we're looking at it is we're looking at hiring higher value strategist and ensuring that interoperability of people at that higher level with the with within the company and within the clients or working with the clients.

Like, we're putting more culture and more human in the loop for that and and evolving into how do we how do we leverage this meta system that's coming down, and what does it do for our workforce downstream, which means now we've got an entire workforce that we have the opportunity to upscale.

Right.

And it gives us more capacity to scale. So it can produce the results, but we're taking a human in the loop approach. I think that's the key thing is if you do human out of the loop, you're probably destined for a desolate workplace in the future. If you keep human in the loop and leveraging AI, again, you'll get the efficiency gain and maintain the culture.

Yeah. It also strikes me is that there's probably an interesting lesson there for employees, and I'm seeing this in a lot of industries, is the the $100,000 job annual job is being replaced, and and it's it's splitting. Right? So somebody's gonna be making a 150 because what they're doing is so much more valuable, and then what's left is now being done by somebody who's making 50. And so you you kind of take the middle and just cut it out, and you're either going up or down in terms of the value that you contribute to that loop.

And so I think it's an important concept for employees to be thinking about is, all right, how do I make sure that I end up on the upside of that split? How do I add more value? The more creative, the more relational touches, the more strategic. Like, those are the things that I think are going to become, better paid. And the tactical, I think, is gonna get a lot of the stuff ripped out of it, and it's gonna become a much more tactical lower entry value skill.

So I've got kind of a spicy cake for you, Ryan. I would tell a client of mine, a leader and executive, that if your people prefer bots over coworkers, it's not the bots that are broken, it's the culture. How do you create environments where collaboration feels

safe. Oh, collaboration feels safe. Okay. I mean, I think if your culture's currently rewarding solo wins and and punish punishing vulnerability. Mhmm.

People will always choose AI. It's predictable. So let's talk about a few things of how we can flip the script. Right?

Okay.

Make asking for help public and celebrate it. Because the more people feel safe to ask for help, then the more willing people are gonna do it. When they see it's incriminated or they feel they're put down or this, that, and the other, people are gonna regress. The other thing I would actually say is, this is a little bit of a leader tip, is don't ever go to somebody and say, how can I help you? Ask them, what do you need from me?

Because that gives them the opportunity to respond back into it, as opposed to the how can I help you assumes they're not capable of doing it? So I think

I like that.

I think, one, showing that it's okay to ask for help in public, and celebrating it, and then making sure you're asking in a in a good way. Normalizing team problem solving sessions that are fun. I will say, in the one that we had the other day, it was a iron clashing iron. Like, if you imagine, like, two people with swords, it was like we pulled out the swords and we were clashing swords to, like, understand each other. Mhmm.

And it wasn't to, like, fight each other to the death, but it wasn't it was like a training session. Mhmm. And at the end of the day, we were laughing, we were smiling, we were happy, we're having fun, and we were problem solving. And so I'm not saying, like, every problem solving session needs to be, you know, a a an iron, you know, swords clash. But, again, it's it's all about having unsaved solving the real problems.

I think the other thing too is set rules around, you know, when AI is encouraged and when human client, collaboration is mandatory. I think an example earlier is we have a dedicated team meeting every week to get myself, my peer, and our two major direct reports on our side to get together to solve problems. Now we may use chat GPT to prompt stuff back and forth, but we're using ChatGPT to bring conversation to it. We're not trying to, hey, everybody. We need to solve this problem this week.

Everybody come with their solutions.

Right.

So it it keeps the human collaboration in the loop as opposed to replacing it.

That's good. So so as a CEO, how would you encourage, incentivize your team to choose human collaboration even when sometimes it might feel easier to reach for chat g p t?

Well, you you know I'm a big fan of red line, green line.

Oh, yeah.

Jumping to the red line, the perceived value is always gonna have a negative outcome. So first and foremost, you gotta look, is this are we working to something towards the future? Is this a leadership decision? And and and when I say leadership decision, I don't mean, like, upper echelon leadership. Like, this could be a manager level decision, but you're moving the team forward in a way that the team hasn't done before.

Like, those things have to have human collaboration. I think the other thing too is if you go to, ChatGPT, you prompt it, it gives you an answer, and you try to defend that, like, you go to your team, and they're like, there's loops and holes in this, and you start defending what ChatGPT puts out, there's a reason why the little disclaimer at the bottom says, ChatGPT can make mistakes. Please review the work. So if you're valuing what ChatGPT puts out over what your colleagues are pushing back on, like, you're you're messing it up. So when you're trying to solve complex problems, when you're trying to work synergistically through the business, when you're trying to drive something with the team or work together, the human collaboration, the EQ side of the equation, the emotional intelligence, AI cannot solve that yet.

So if you try to solve an EQ problem that requires collaboration with AI, you will fail. It's good advice.

I heard it said that the leaders of the past had good answers. The leaders of the future ask good questions, And that might be another way that a senior leader could encourage their people to lean towards human interactions as opposed to just putting it into chat GPT is encourage your people to learn how to ask better questions. Because I think we're coming to a day, and that is actually probably already here, where the the answers are easy. It's asking the right question that actually is becoming harder and harder.

Well, I I think it's okay to use ChatGPT or one of the AIs to help figure out those questions. I've done Sure. My more recent quarterly sessions with companies with, you know, senior executive leaders is is I've gone into chat GPT. And, again, because I'm the expert and, yeah, I can come up with these questions on my own, but I also know what good questions are. But I didn't ask people to prefill these questions, or I didn't tell them, hey.

Go to chat and, you know, give it your problems and hand that to me. No. I figured out the questions, and this last one we did, it took us an hour to go around the room to these nines questions with the six leaders in the room. But what we learned from that conversation is meaningfully moving their organization of 230 people forward. Mhmm.

Because we we leveraged the tool to get the right questions, but we were in physically in the room together solving the problems that arose from the questions.

Yeah. So here's a spicy take. Don't build your company around bots, and then wonder why it feels like nobody cares.

Well, AI is not gonna care about your problem. It's just gonna smile and keep on going. Right?

Right. They're the the AI bots are mercenaries. They do not care. They're there to do a job. They will do their job, but don't expect them to care.

Alright. So if AI isn't inherently good or bad, but I think hiding behind it, using it instead of collaborating with your coworkers, I don't think that's always productivity. I think it's avoidance.

In in culture, it's built through friction and through human awkwardness. If we remove that entirely, maybe we don't have a workplace, We have an assembly line.

Are we ready for a world where your most meaningful work relationships are prompt engineered? Let us know what you think. Respond. Give us your comments, your thoughts, your experiences. I'd love to hear how AI has helped you and your team thrive, or where it's become, kind of your favorite hiding spot.

Share this episode with anybody that's wrestling with these questions. Maybe somebody who's avoiding an awkward conversation with a coworker because it's, easier to just put it into, chat GPT. And subscribe because next week, we're diving into how to lead when AI is smarter than you. Thanks for listening.

Oh, how to lead when AI is smarter than you. So keep in mind, the whole goal is to make work not suck. If we can bring balance to the workplace, maybe we can have a little more fun. Maybe we can have a little more enjoyment in life, and maybe life will suck less. So tune in next week on how to lead when AI outsmarts you.

Make work not suck. Our podcast that talks about exactly that, our process, vision, journey, culture, and results. We present real world business solutions that make the difference. Our goal is to make work not suck, hosted by Ryan Hodges, co host Daniel Steer. Join us each episode and make work not suck.