Most AI at work is bullshit — Faster Horses

Faster Horses

Most AI work inside companies is bullshit.

It's not because AI is bad, or that people are lazy. It's not even really that the tools are overhyped, though, okay, a lot of them are. Most AI at work is bullshit because companies are trying to adopt AI without changing how work is managed.

That distinction matters. A lot of companies think they are becoming AI-first because more employees are using AI tools. But AI usage is not transformation.

People inside your company are rewriting emails faster. People are summarizing meetings. Someone builds a little demo. Someone creates a prompt library. Someone posts in Slack that they used Claude to think through a problem. For a few weeks, the company really feels like it is moving.

But the work itself often stays the same.

This is the strange part about AI adoption. AI is supposedly the thing that will change everything, yet most companies use it to preserve the existing system. The same workflows, meetings, dashboards, job descriptions; the same incentives and very similar results. The only difference is that now some of the work is slightly faster, slightly more automated, and slightly harder to evaluate.

That’s how you get bullshit AI work: work that creates the feeling of progress without creating much actual value.

The way I look at it, there are a few levels of bullshit AI at work, and they largely go along with whatever the level of AI adoption is at your company.

AI adoption stages

A company with no real AI initiative has one kind of bullshit. A company where leadership tells everyone to “use AI” has another. A company where everyone is vibe coding has another. And the most advanced companies eventually run into a harder truth: this was never mainly about tools. It was about change management.

BS 1: The vague AI push

The first kind of bullshit is the vague AI push.

This is when leadership announces that everyone should use AI more. The message usually sounds right: "We need to become AI-first. We need to automate repetitive work. We need to free people up for more strategic work. We need everyone to start experimenting with AI."

None of this is wrong. The problem is that it's incomplete.

What happens after the announcement? Usually, not much. No dedicated time. No clear goals, or budget. No operating rhythm. No explanation of what good looks like. No change to team priorities. Just a message, some emojis, maybe a new Slack channel, and a general feeling that everyone is now expected to figure it out by themselves.

The company thinks it has started becoming AI-first. In reality, it sent a Slack message. The expectations and pressure are high, the directions are low.

I don't actually know where I took this from. Sorry.

This is not an AI strategy. It's a wish.

If leadership wants AI to become real, they have to make it real in the calendar, the budget, and the operating system of the company. At Omnisend, we eventually created an initiative called AI as a Habit. The idea was simple: AI was not something people were supposed to squeeze into the gaps between meetings. It was part of the job.

We allocated a percentage of people’s time to working with AI. We carved it into their planning; created actual space for them to explore, learn, and apply AI. This matters because time is the most honest signal a company can send. If something is important, it gets time. If it gets no dedicated time, it is not important. It's just decoration.

Omnisend's "AI as a Habit" initiative

We also created monthly AI Days.

On the first Friday of every month, people cleared their calendars and focused on AI-related improvements. Most meetings were cancelled. Some of the day was education, some of it was experimentation, and some of it was teams sitting together and asking what painful part of their work could be improved.

The exact format dependds on what your company or your team can allow, and honestly it matters less than the signal. AI became real work.

And this is the thing leadership often misses: people do not change how they work because leadership says “please innovate.” They change when the system around them changes. If you tell people AI is important but give them no time to work on it, they will understand the real message: AI is important, but not as important as everything already on your calendar.

So yes, at the beginning, you probably have to force the time a little bit. Not in a creepy way. But in the sense that you put it on the calendar and say: this is the time. Clear your schedule. Work on this. No opt-outs.

Otherwise, you're asking for it to happen organically, which means it will happen very slowly, which means it probably will not happen at all.

BS 2: Productivity theater

The second kind of bullshit is productivity theater.

This usually happens after people have started using AI for small individual tasks. They polish emails, summarize documents, rewrite Slack messages, use...