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For decades, this system sustained itself with rituals: long and useless meetings, excessive documentation, convoluted chains of approval, and performative busyness that drive up headcount and slow down progress without any delivering any appreciable improvement in outcomes. But AI is stripping away the theater, automating the symbolic and intangible aspects of work, precisely the tasks that were never truly value-generating to begin with.
Let's be clear: AI hasn't fundamentally changed most jobs yet. It's not that large swaths of the workforce have been replaced or redeployed. What AI is doing -- faster than most companies can react -- is mimicking the performative layer of knowledge work. Drafting emails. Creating status updates. Rewording proposals. Polishing presentations. Transcribing and summarizing meetings that arguably didn't need to happen in the first place. As Yuval Harari recently noted, AI is already a better storyteller than humans. It is also challenging humans when it comes to not just work, but also pretending to work, in the sense of replicating a range of job-related activities that more clearly result in being busy than actually productive (in the sense of adding value).
If an AI can instantly generate a company's glossy annual report (complete with "letters from the CEO" and strategic road maps), it exposes how formulaic these documents really are. They read less like authentic reflections of vision or performance and more like templated PR exercises, optimized for investors' expectations. The ease with which they can be faked shows just how little originality or substance was there in the first place. We're witnessing a productivity revolution without a purpose revolution. Tools are improving, but the work remains hollow. Instead of using AI to invent better ways of working, many companies are simply using it to churn out more of the same, only faster. But running faster in the wrong direction just means getting lost faster -- and if everyone is doing it, we risk just getting lost in a forest of sameness