Many companies silently assume that everybody wants more AI in their lives — that people are craving new AI features, new AI products, new AI workflows that would magically replace outdated practices and broken ways of working.
But in reality, people don’t want more AI at all — at least not in the way most AI leaders envision it. Many AI features have low adoption and retention at a very high cost of delivery, and a high risk of reputation damage.
The AI People Don’t Need
It’s remarkably difficult to make a strong argument with senior leadership, but AI is not a value proposition. New AI features don’t magically make for happy or excited customers. Because AI features are often bolt-ons and separate tools for employees to use, they typically take people out of their regular way of working.
AI is pretty good at amplifying shortcuts and shortcomings in organizations — from data quality to decision making. It can’t magically fix years of accumulated quick patches, technical debt, broken culture, and internal politics. If anything, those problems become more visible with AI, as inconsistencies and conflicting priorities get handed directly to users, who are then left to make sense of the mess themselves.
In most organizations, work already requires hopping between plenty of disconnected and fragmented systems. With a new AI tool, people now have yet another system to context-switch into. It often produces more work — and typically not particularly rewarding work either.
On top of that, people are very much aware of the cost of finding and fixing AI hallucinations. Asking AI to generate a response might feel easier than writing from scratch, but it has a real cost:
- Skim through the entire AI output
- Spot key points to focus attention on
- Review/verify key points, one by one
- Check rationale for what follows next
- Articulate corrections and regenerate
- Review the response a number of times
AI goes in Key Activities and Key Resources — not in Value Propositions. Image by David Bland.
For many people, AI isn’t something they can proactively choose and explore on their own — it arrives uninvited, at someone else’s pace. Plenty of messaging amplifies fears and worries about AI replacing jobs, so it’s hardly surprising that the dominant perception isn’t excitement. It’s resistance to change and deep anxiety about one’s place in a world that seems to be changing without them.
AI Productivity Study / US: AI doesn’t reduce work — it intensifies it. Via Mike Rosenberg, NBC News, HBR, WSJ, Activtrak.
At best, AI features might be silently accepted or nodded away. At worst, AI raises concerns, doubts, and caution — calling for a healthy dose of skepticism. Sometimes it’s perceived as a threat or liability, because unlike other features, AI is neither predictable nor reliable.
People don’t dream of AI art museums or AI fridges or AI hotel receptions or AI-narrated children’s books. They don’t want their children to have romantic AI partners. Most people don’t want to actively manage (and clean up after) a swarm of AI agents roaming in their bank accounts and acting on their behalf in the real world. And most notably, people don’t really want a magical box to speak to or type into all the time.
The AI People Actually Need
The common comparison of AI features to unreliable humans misses the point. People don’t compare software with other people — they compare features with features. If one feature in one product is unreliable while a similar feature works flawlessly in another, they choose the latter. It’s not about AI or no AI, but rather what works consistently and reliably, and what doesn’t.
Many conversations about AI are really conversations about speed of delivery. But to many people, there is little value in increasing that speed. They want to do things well, with enough time to think and make good decisions. They also want to enjoy the time they spend working on things, rather than just ship faster. There is an enormous feeling of reward and achievement that slowly disappears, one vibe-coded change at a time.
People don’t change much. After all these years, they still want features that are fast, accessible, reliable, predictable, and useful — every single time. And ideally not ones that replace their entire workflow, but that augment their way of working — taking over the most mundane, annoying, and boring tasks that they find no pleasure in.
Jobs least and most vulnerable to AI. Sources: GovAI and Brookings Institution, via The Washington Post.
Many jobs are exposed to AI automation, but in many of them there is a rewarding, unique, creative part that requires taste, point of view, and human intuition. When AI automates the boring parts, that’s an advantage for everyone — it enhances productivity and brings more joy to daily work.
When AI automates tedious and mentally exhausting tasks, its value is much easier to grasp. But for that to happen, AI shouldn’t feel like a bolt-on. It needs to be deeply integrated into people’s existing workflows, matching the mental models they have developed and fine-tuned over years or decades. AI should adapt to how people already work — not force people to adapt to it.
