I met someone at a conference recently who introduced herself as the “Chief AI Officer” at a large GCC. When I asked what that actually meant, she paused. “I’m basically the person who explains to the board why we’re not as AI-forward as they think we should be,” she said. Then laughed. “I spend most of my time in meetings about meetings about AI strategy.”
She’s been using AI to write those strategy documents. The board uses AI to generate questions about them. The consultants they hired use AI to create frameworks for implementing AI. Everyone’s using AI to talk about using AI, in an endless recursive loop that would be funny if it wasn’t so expensive.
This is the reality of generative AI in 2025: a technology powerful enough to transform work, deployed primarily to maintain the illusion that work is happening.
The Great Pretending, Automated
The numbers tell one story: 95% of companies are using generative AI. Productivity is supposed to increase by 25%. C-suite executives are euphoric. AI budgets have doubled. We’re on the cusp of transformation.
The reality tells another: 77% of employees say AI has actually decreased their productivity. Half don’t know how they’ll ever achieve the gains their bosses expect. One in three are ready to quit from AI-induced burnout. The people actually using these tools are drowning in the gap between promise and reality.
But here’s what nobody’s talking about: everyone’s using it anyway. Not for the revolutionary transformation promised in board decks. They’re using it for the same thing that’s kept corporate culture running for decades—maintaining appearances.
A developer friend showed me his screen recently. Three windows open: his actual code, AI generating documentation that nobody will read, and another AI window writing his status update about the documentation. “I’m using AI to create the performance of productivity,” he said. “The actual coding takes two hours. The theatrical demonstration that I’m coding takes six.”
The technology that was supposed to eliminate bullshit jobs has instead become the ultimate bullshit job enabler. We’ve automated the pretense.
The Secret Everyone Knows
A recent survey found that 71% of full-time employees are burned out and 65% report struggling with employer demands on their productivity. Meanwhile, executives believe AI will boost productivity. The disconnect is staggering, but it makes perfect sense when you understand what’s actually happening.
Walk into any office and you’ll find the same pattern. Junior employees using AI to write emails that sound more “professional.” Managers using it to generate performance reviews that sound more “strategic.” Executives using it to create presentations that sound more “visionary.”
Everyone’s in on the secret: we’re using AI to sound like we think we’re supposed to sound. To perform the role of the employee we think we’re supposed to be. To generate the artifacts of work without the substance.
A friend in consulting admitted their entire team uses AI to generate client deliverables. “The client knows we’re using AI. We know they know. They know we know they know. But we all pretend it’s our ‘proprietary methodology’ because that’s what justifies the fee.”
The consultants use AI to create frameworks. The clients use AI to evaluate them. Soon, it’ll just be AIs talking to AIs, with humans attending the meetings to maintain the fiction that decisions are being made.
The Burnout Nobody Expected
The promise was that AI would handle the mundane, freeing us for creative work. Instead, almost 80% of workers who use generative AI in their jobs said it has added to their workload. They spend more time reviewing AI output than they would have spent doing the work. More time learning tools that don’t quite work. More time managing the expectation that they should be exponentially more productive.
“I spend half my day fact-checking ChatGPT,” a marketing director told me. “Then I spend the other half pretending the efficiencies are transformational. It’s exhausting.”
The cruel irony: Workers with the least experience see the biggest gains from AI—35% productivity improvements for newcomers versus essentially flat for experienced workers. The people who actually know how to do the work see no benefit. They’re spending their time teaching the machine to approximate competence.
Meanwhile, the executives who’ve never done the actual work are the most convinced of AI’s transformative power. They see demos, not daily reality. They see potential, not practice. They’re making decisions about AI implementation based on AI-generated reports about AI capabilities.
The Agents That Never Arrive
Everyone’s talking about AI agents—autonomous systems that will actually do work rather than just generate text about work. 2025 was supposed to be the year of the AI agent. The year we go from experimentation to implementation.
But talk to anyone actually trying to deploy these systems and you hear the same story. The agents work perfectly in demos. They fail spectacularly in reality. They can’t handle edge cases. They hallucinate. They need so much human oversight that you might as well do the work yourself.
“We spent six months building an AI agent to handle customer service,” a tech executive told me. “It works great 80% of the time. The other 20% it tells customers to go fuck themselves. Politely, but still.”
The dirty secret of AI agents: they’re just more sophisticated performance art. More elaborate ways to pretend automation is handling things while humans scramble behind the scenes to clean up the mess.
The Parallel Reality
What’s emerging isn’t the AI transformation executives imagine. It’s something more subversive.
Employees are using AI, but not how their companies think. They’re using AI to do their corporate job in two hours, then spending the rest of the day on what actually matters to them. Building side projects. Learning real skills. Creating actual value.
A product manager at a major tech company told me she uses AI to generate all her required documentation. “I can produce a week’s worth of ‘deliverables’ in a morning,” she said. “The rest of the time, I’m building my own product. My boss thinks I’m incredibly productive. I am—just not for them.”
This is the real transformation: AI hasn’t replaced human workers. It’s revealed how much of work was always theater. Now we can automate the performance and focus on what matters.
The question isn’t whether AI will take your job. It’s whether your job was ever real to begin with.
The Skills That Actually Matter
In this new reality, the most valuable skill isn’t prompt engineering. It’s understanding the game being played. Knowing when to deploy AI for maximum theatrical effect. When to generate the appearance of work. When to actually do work.
The people thriving aren’t the AI evangelists or the skeptics. They’re the pragmatists who understand that generative AI is a tool for navigating corporate theater, not transforming it.
They use AI to write the emails that need to sound professional. They use it to generate the reports nobody reads. They use it to create the presentations that justify decisions already made. And then they use the time saved to do something real.
“I’m not worried about AI replacing me,” a designer told me. “I’m using it to replace the parts of my job that should never have existed.”
The Moment of Recognition
“We’ve done a disservice by anthropomorphizing AI—talking about agents as employees or coworkers,” says a BCG managing director. He’s right, but not for the reasons he thinks.
The disservice isn’t that we’ve made AI seem too human. It’s that we’ve revealed how robotic human corporate work has become. How much of our professional lives consist of generating predictable text outputs based on pattern recognition.
When ChatGPT or Claude can write your performance review, what does that say about performance reviews? When AI can generate your strategy document, what does that say about strategy? When a large language model can do your job, what does that say about your job?
The existential crisis isn’t that AI might replace us. It’s that it’s showing us how replaceable we always were—not because we lack value, but because the system never valued what makes us human in the first place.
The New Corporate Reality
The companies that will thrive aren’t the ones that successfully “implement AI.” They’re the ones that recognize what AI reveals about work itself. That acknowledge the performance. That stop pretending the emails matter more than the ideas. That value human creativity over algorithmic productivity.
But that would require admitting that much of corporate work is theater. And nobody’s ready for that conversation. So we’ll keep using AI to optimize the pretense. To make the meaningless more efficient. To automate the artifice.
A startup founder told me they explicitly hire people who are “good at the real work, terrible at the corporate performance.” Then they use AI to handle the performance part. “ChatGPT writes our investor updates. Our team builds the actual product. It’s the only sustainable division of labor.”
Permission to Stop Pretending
The liberating truth about generative AI is that it proves what we’ve always suspected: most of what we do at work doesn’t matter. The reports, the decks, the emails, the strategies—they’re props in an elaborate play about productivity.
AI can generate all of it. Faster, cheaper, more consistently. And if a pattern-matching machine can do it, maybe it was never worth doing in the first place.
So here’s your permission, if you need it: use AI for the performance. Automate the artifice. Generate the deliverables. But save your humanity for what matters. For the work that requires genuine thought, creativity, connection—the things that can’t be prompted into existence.
The death of the corporate AI role isn’t about AI replacing humans. It’s about AI revealing that the role was always an algorithm—a predictable pattern of inputs and outputs that we convinced ourselves was meaningful.
Now that a machine can perform it, we’re free to be human again. The question is whether we remember how.
The Future That’s Already Here
The transformation is already happening, just not where the executives are looking. In the gaps between meetings. In the hours reclaimed from meaningless tasks. In the side projects and secret innovations of employees who’ve figured out the game.
They’re using AI to maintain their corporate presence while building their actual future. They’re automating the performance of work while doing real work elsewhere. They’re treating their corporate role as infrastructure for their actual ambitions.
The corporate AI role is dead. Not because AI killed it, but because AI revealed it was never alive. It was always an algorithm, waiting to be automated. Now that it can be, we can finally focus on what can’t.
The employees who understand this aren’t worried about the future. They’re already building it, while their AI assistant writes another strategy document about digital transformation that nobody will read.
The revolution isn’t coming. It’s here. It’s just not evenly distributed. And it’s happening in the spaces between the prompts, in the humanity that refuses to be optimized, in the work that matters too much to delegate to a machine.
The corporate AI role is dead. Long live whatever you build in the time it frees.
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