The Least Imaginative Use of AI

Laying people off may be the least imaginative use of AI.

Let’s assume three people who know how to use it well can produce as much as a fifteen-person team. I don’t think that’s a stretch anymore. For a lot of knowledge work, it’s already true.

The cost-cutting argument writes itself. Keep the three people, let the other twelve go, and put the savings on the next quarterly report. It’s clean, and it’s easy to defend to a board.

But it answers the smallest possible version of the question.

The bigger question is the one nobody asks. What could all fifteen people build if every one of them learned to work that way?

You wouldn’t have the output of three. You’d have something closer to the capacity of seventy-five, without hiring another sixty. And the people who’d get that capacity are the ones already closest to your customers and your daily problems. They’d finally have time to attempt the things they’ve been thinking about for years and never had the hours to try.

The layoff gives you one quarter with a prettier labor number. Keeping the people gives you whatever they build next quarter, and the quarter after that.

There’s another return that’s harder to put on a spreadsheet. People who spend less time doing work they hate and more time doing work they care about tend to stay. They solve problems nobody formally assigned to them, because they finally have enough room to notice those problems in the first place.

I understand why a leader reaches for the labor number. It’s sitting right there. It’s certain and immediate, and it makes the quarter look responsible.

But cutting people before you’ve seen what they can build with the capacity you just handed them is a failure of imagination. Maybe worse. It’s a failure of faith in what your own company could become.

And most of the people reading this aren’t the ones who decide who gets cut. You’re the ones who’d be asked to do more with the tools, or shown the door so the number looks better. So this is the question worth sitting with:

If your week wasn’t swallowed by admin and the tasks you dread, what would you finally build that leadership isn’t even thinking about yet?