08/07/2026
Happy FriYAY!!
You know, we already have to prove we are human on the internet. I am guessing you know what I mean.
“Select all the squares with a traffic light.”
“Type the characters you see.”
“Select all the buses.”
Apparently, we are going to need something similar at work soon! Perhaps we will be asked:
“Please select all the sentences in this email that you actually wrote.”
“Please identify which part of this presentation you personally understand.”
“Please confirm that you actually had this thought before asking AI to have it for you.”
I know. It sounds ridiculous. Except that maybe it’s actually not. I am on LinkedIn nearly every day and see posts about authenticity that are obviously written by AI and then someone wants to collaborate with me. I can't evaluate someone's thinking when AI has done the communicating for them. I can’t see what they actually know because I am not seeing their own thought processes.
We are already watching some pretty strange things happen as AI becomes part of everyday work. We now have employees generating work with AI, managers evaluating that work with AI, and executives making decisions based on information that may have been generated by AI in the first place.
So while executives are trying to figure out AI strategy, workforce transformation, productivity, employee engagement and the future of work, they are also dealing with things that would have sounded completely ridiculous five years ago.
The workplace is changing faster than our ideas about how people work together. I am not saying we should stop using AI. I use technology too, and I think there are some incredible things we can do with it. But we also know it cannot replace trust or belonging, and it certainly cannot build psychological safety. In fact, it can create the opposite effect. Moreover, it certainly cannot have the difficult conversation when a human being is struggling.
I just think we need to be careful about what we are actually optimizing for. If we make everything faster, but people stop thinking for themselves, is that really progress? If we automate communication, what happens to connection?
The more technology we bring into the workplace, the more intentional we may need to become about the things that make our work environments more human. Our responsibility as leaders is to make sure we don't change the work so quickly that we forget what makes people want to be there in the first place.
