Your AI rollout is already political
People do not hear AI announcements in a vacuum, they hear them after months of layoffs, hype, and anti-AI noise.
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In today’s newsletter:
What does this mean for change?
So what about my AI transformation?
So how do you respond?
What do I do this week?
I’ve been thinking a lot about how attitudes in wider society about AI spill over into the workplace. What change playbooks can we run to drive better adoption and return on spend?
When you’re thinking about how you want to implement AI to do things better, faster, and cheaper in your business, part of the landscape you’re operating in is one where many of your employees spent the morning commute scrolling through a social media feed with reels where people are ranting about AI data centre water use or other sorts of politically charged anti-AI commentary.
This means when you make any AI-related announcement at work, you’re already operating inside a polluted thought space.
What does this mean for change?
I think it means that if you don’t have a clear idea of what level of AI use you want in your future state operating model, and you haven’t clearly articulated how you will bring your people on that journey, you’re starting on the back foot.
A lot of the layoffs that have been labelled as AI layoffs haven’t helped this year because it’s flooded the zone where a lot of different issues are being conflated into one.
Wanting to cut jobs because of “overhiring”. Wanting to cut jobs onshore so that you can do things “cheaper” offshore. Wanting to cut jobs because you actually did deploy some AI workflows or previous automation projects that have some similar impact but no AI attached.
All three options could be sitting beneath something labelled as an “AI job layoff”. When you read or listen to what corporate executives say on earnings calls, press releases, or interviews about how they are thinking about AI, it is clear that a lot of the rhetoric in the public domain is split between two things at the opposite end of the spectrum.
On one side, you have people claiming that they are hiring more. They will need more skilled people. AI is going to create more new jobs. It is just like any other normal technology.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, AI is helping cut costs. AI is helping reduce headcount. AI is going to enable the business to scale up headcount reductions over the next couple of years.
When companies update earnings guidance, those statements carry regulatory consequences if they are materially misleading.
This all feels like “flooding the zone” where there are so many new announcements and new perspectives every day that it’s hard to know what’s going on.
