After a recent presentation to senior and C-suite leaders across multiple industries on how AI is re-shaping work I find the conversations lead to extremes… From we are all in to>>> we do not know how to get started👣.
It’s also ( yes, still surprising) when I hear people with the attitude that AI will NOT CHANGE HOW I WORK. AI will not initially replace… but it will separate and re-organize those that leverage this advantage and those that do not.

The disruption rarely looks like replacement anyway. It looks like compression. Tasks that took a week take a day. Teams of five become two. The people who don’t adapt don’t get fired immediately — they just become visibly less productive relative to peers who are augmenting aggressively.

There’s also a status dynamic worth naming: for knowledge workers, the process of work has always been tied to professional identity. Admitting a tool can do in 20 minutes what took you two days is psychologically costly. So people find reasons to discount it.

The people most confident AI won’t change how they work are often constructing the most elaborate reasoning to avoid finding out.

And when entire leadership teams share the hallucination? You get companies treating AI as a productivity “side hustle” — tools at the margins, workflows unchanged — while competitive exposure quietly accumulates.