our workplace LLM mass delusion – ava's blog

our workplace LLM mass delusion

10 Jun, 2026

I can't help but wonder whether we will look back on this AI hype in the workplace with confusion and embarrassment. If we indeed progress into a future where the bubble will burst, models will further close up, become too expensive for the average user, enshittified, or really specialized for specific fields and most promises end up not fulfilled, how will employers everywhere play this off? How will employees recover from witnessing this cultish environment suddenly dropping off as if nothing happened?

My employer, for example, struggles with funding. Open positions are not to be filled and will just fall away; employee bonuses for great work have been permanently cancelled 2 years ago due to the tense financial situation; necessities fell away with a message to just "find a way to deal with it". Several departments are completely overworked with no help in sight, and are just asked to cut corners. Important licenses and databases are dropped to save money.

This is the backdrop to our AI adoption in the workplace. Still, somehow, there is enough money to hire consultants that advise to go all in on AI for a possible future where money can be saved, and enough money to pay external companies for LLM workshops and seminars for employees for years, and enough money to pay for licenses of both ChatGPT and Copilot.

That means: The employee bonuses that should go to all the hardworking employees, and the money to further support our work, is going to grifters, security risks, bad workshops that are not teaching anything remotely usable for our work, and technofascists.

Not only that!

We have recurring house-wide meetings where groups are asked to show off their LLM projects. They register them, try them out for a couple months, and then come back presenting their results. I have attended all of these meetings so far, and there was not a single one that actually worked out. All projects ended with the conclusion that this isn't workable, that this isn't saving time, or that it over-complicates things. Hundreds of people, different teams, people enthusiastic about AI, all kinds of projects, and there wasn't a single success .

All kinds of workshops, "prompt-engineering", custom GPTs and skills, pre-prepared documents and templates could not make something truly effective and reproducible in our field of work (not anything coding related!). It was a messy gamble every time. It took a significant amount of time to fine-tune everything, to repeat the task, to verify the output, and correct mistakes before continuing with the rest of the workflow. Not considering this or that document, hallucinations, inability to fill in documents correctly or edit them were the biggest complaints. Even on an Enterprise license, the restrictions were too great.

But wait, there's more!

We also have house-wide meetings where employees show off how ChatGPT can be used regardless of specific projects; just general use cases for the workday. Let me tell you what great things were shown off.

For one, it was shown that you can ask the bot how it feels today. That wasn't presented as a joke, or being sarcastic; no, it was shown very seriously, I guess under the guise of how cool and futuristic and human it is. I'm getting really upset here at the point of writing this, because I have to fight hard to get the funding for the database my team needs for my work and have to justify it every year, and I know that in any other contexts, or just 5 years ago, they would have laughed in your face if you suggested to get a subscription in the thousands to enable employees to have a pointless conversation with a bot. Hello, we have shit to do over here, departments are drowning in work, and you wanna have software that talks to you? That would have been the response, and it is the correct response still!! People like that need to be treated like the fools they are, and we need to challenge them more!

Next up was the great use case of downloading the cafeteria menu (which is a 1 page nicely designed Excel sheet, like a timetable, showing the different options for each day) from the intranet, giving it to ChatGPT, and asking it what's for lunch on Wednesday. I wish I was joking . I WISH! The bot spat out a longer answer than reading the entire sheet would be. Downloading and uploading and writing the prompt took longer than just reading the sheet. You can see what's for lunch on Wednesday with one glance already. No bot needed!

The other general use case presented to us (by our head of IT, no less) was that if we are not sure whether something is a spam mail, phishing attempt, a mail with a suspicious attachment, whatever... we should save it to our Desktop, upload it to ChatGPT and ask it. Good god. I am still in disbelief. I'm sorry, but I don't want the less technically inclined employees among us to save anything shady onto their work laptop....