AI

The problem with AI at work is not just bad outputs. It's that too many organizations now require a performance of belief. Not a result. Not proof. Belief. The willingness to say, out loud, in the right meeting, that AI is transforming your work — whether or not it actually is. And once an organization starts rewarding that performance, it stops being able to hear the one sentence it needs most: this is not working. The coordination problem nobody wants to name Cory Doctorow,

Most leaders think employee experience is a state. Good or bad. Healthy or toxic. A number on an engagement survey that either clears the bar or doesn't. That's the wrong model. Employee experience is not a state. It's a slope. It drifts. Slowly, quietly, and mostly out of view — until one day the work is worse, the people are tired, and nobody can point to the moment it went sideways. There wasn't a moment. There was a slide. And the customer meets the bottom of that slide l

In the last post, I argued that "AI slop" is a signal, not just an insult. I laid out three patterns for how people experience AI inside a product or content stream: Invisible Assistance, Visible Augmentation, and Slop. And I promised to come back and expand them. Here's the twist I saved for this one. When people talk about these patterns, they picture customers. The user staring at the feed. The reader reaching for the report button. The audience that can smell a machine-wr

LinkedIn just added a "Seems like AI slop" button. Think about what that admission actually contains. A platform built on professional self-presentation, owned by Microsoft, deeply invested in the AI moment, looked at its own feed and decided it needed a formal mechanism for users to say this feels fake. Its chief product officer said the company blocks hundreds of thousands of automated slop comments a day and has stopped billions of automation attempts in a matter of months

When people reach out to talk about my dissertation, they rarely want to talk about the whole thing. Fair enough. They usually want to talk about one line: your product or service experience is often just an outward expression of your employee experience. I have never formally named that idea, mostly because I did not want to brand it unless I had a name good enough to deserve it. But for now, this will do: The Inside-Out Employee Experience Principle. The idea is simple. If

I saw The Odyssey yesterday. It's a great movie — the kind that reminds you why people still leave the house to sit in the dark with strangers. Nolan shot the whole thing on IMAX film, and it shows. Go see it. But this isn't a film review. It's about something Nolan said afterward that I haven't been able to shake. Asked whether AI might be a Trojan horse — a gift you welcome in, only to watch it turn into something darker — he laughed and said, "AI is a Trojan horse that eve

When I was a student at Creighton, I got to see Warren Buffett speak in person a handful of times. He never dressed up his message. Year after year, he came back to the same warning: when corporations chase quarterly profits above everything else, the quality of their products and services suffers. That idea stuck with me. Not because it was clever, but because it was so obviously true and so widely ignored. Most companies don't invest in their infrastructure until something

Let's get one thing out of the way. AI is real. It is useful. It is not going anywhere. You can watch it draft, summarize, classify, and write code at a pace that would have looked like science fiction a few years ago. Teams move faster with it. Researchers cover more ground. Support tickets get triaged before a human ever opens them. Anyone telling you the technology is fake or a passing fad is selling their own kind of hype. So this is not a "kill your AI budget" essay. The

There's a rule so old and so obvious in my field that we sometimes forget to say it out loud. It's number one on Jakob Nielsen's list of usability heuristics, and it's been sitting at the top since before half the people building AI today could ride a bike. It's called visibility of system status, and it boils down to a single, almost parental idea: tell people what's going on. That's it. When something is loading, show a spinner. When a file saves, say "saved." When the elev