My AI Mad Libs cartoon last week on urgency without clarity in AI strategy was one of my most licensed cartoons from the last 24 years.
It got me thinking of the trickle-down effects of muddled strategy through an organization.
Whenever there’s ill-defined strategy at the top, there will be poor alignment all the way down. This is particularly true with something as consequential yet open-to-interpretation as AI.
The quickest lever of AI adoption is a mandate just to do more with less.
The recent 40% layoffs by Block (and 20% stock price bump in response) is catnip to companies excited about using AI primarily to justify cost-cutting. This has been criticized as “AI washing.”
But the effects of this type of AI cost-cutting carries a cost, as Kate Niederhoffer, Alexi Robichaux and Jeffrey T. Hancock have been chronicling in a series of HBR articles on the rise of “workslop” driven by unclear AI mandates:
“As companies have tightened budgets, consolidated roles, and asked employees to take on more tasks without formal role redesign, individual contributors and frontline managers are stretched more than ever. This has left employees psychologically depleted and juggling heavier workloads.
“In this context, blanket mandates to use AI—often without the training, agency, or cultural trust to thoughtfully experiment with these powerful new tools—end up encouraging people to use AI performatively. These low-effort, low-value uses demonstrate compliance with directives to experiment, even as they shift the burden of the work onto the receiver. Hence, workslop.”
Ironically some of the most interesting cases of AI adoption may come, not from organizations, but from individuals using AI to amplify side projects.
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
