AI will not save a company nobody wants to work for

Everyone is currently looking at what AI can cut. Almost nobody is looking at what it does to the people who are still there afterwards, and that is where this is going to go wrong for a lot of businesses.

Here is the sequence, and I think it is about to play out in a great many companies at once.

You take the boring work away

This is the good part, and I am entirely in favour of it. I have spent most of my working life building systems because I cannot stand doing repetitive work and, honestly, because I am not capable of doing it consistently. Automation has always been the thing I reach for first.

So: you automate the admin. The data entry, the reconciliation, the chasing, the reformatting of the same document into the same other document for the ninth time this month. Work that never needed a human being and only had one because nothing else was available.

Good. That work should go.

You offer them the better job

Now you have somebody whose seat has emptied out, and if you are decent about it you do not make them redundant. You offer them something more interesting. More responsibility. Work that actually needs a person.

And a proportion of them will say no.

The standard conclusion at this point is that they were not up to it. Not ambitious enough. Did not want it badly enough. You hear this said with a certain amount of regret and a certain amount of relief, because it resolves the situation without requiring anything further from you.

That conclusion is usually wrong, and it is expensive.

They were doing it for the paycheck, and you knew that

Think about what you are actually asking.

Someone took a job that was dull but predictable. They did it competently, they went home at six, and they had a life that the job funded rather than consumed. That was the deal, both parties understood it, and nobody was being short-changed.

Now you are proposing a different deal. You want them to think. To carry something. To be uncomfortable occasionally and to care about the outcome after they have left the building.

That is a much bigger ask, and the only honest question is: what are you offering in return that makes it worth it?

Not money, necessarily. Usually not money. I mean: is this a business that a sensible person would want to invest more of themselves in? Does anyone know where it is going? Has anybody told them what it is for, in words they would repeat to a friend?

Because if the answer is no — and in most companies the answer is no, the vision either does not exist or has never been said out loud to the people doing the work — then turning down the promotion is not a failure of ambition. It is an accurate assessment of the offer.

I learned this the slow way. For two years I ran a company where I expected people to have my appetite for the thing, and when they did not I concluded I was working with idiots. It took me far too long to notice that people with my appetite do not work for other people. They go and build their own thing. That is what the appetite is for. I was hiring employees and then being disappointed in them for not being founders, which is not a strategy, it is just a long way of being unhappy.

And the rest of it was my doing too. At six o’clock they had a life, a partner, a flat, a holiday to think about. They did not owe me their shower thoughts. They had no stake in the thing — if it had gone brilliantly, I would have bought the house. That was my upside and my risk, and I had quietly been expecting them to carry a founder’s preoccupation for an employee’s share of the outcome.

So it lands on the leader, not the employee

The question is not why won’t they step up. It is what would make them want to?

That is a real question with real answers, and none of them are a poster in the kitchen. Does the work play to what this particular person is actually good at, rather than to what happened to need doing? Is their contribution visible to anyone other than their line manager? Is the business going somewhere they can describe? Is there a version of their next five years here that beats their next five years somewhere else?

Only once you have genuinely answered those can you say somebody was not right for the business. And at that point it is a fair conclusion — some people will not want it, and that is allowed. But you have to earn the right to reach it.

Why this is about to matter much more than it does today

Here is the part I think is underpriced.

AI is removing the roles that did not need a person. Those roles were, by and large, filled by people who were there for the paycheck — which was a perfectly reasonable arrangement, and it is ending.

What is left is the work that genuinely requires judgement, relationships, taste, responsibility. Work that only your best people can do.

Which means your best people are about to become dramatically scarcer and dramatically more valuable, at exactly the moment when every other company is discovering the same thing. The competition for them will not be gentle.

So the binding constraint on a business is quietly moving. It used to be capital, then it was technology, and for a brief period it is going to look like technology again. It will not be. It will be whether you are the kind of company that good people stay at.

And that is a leadership problem, not a software problem. You cannot buy it in, you cannot install it, and you cannot do it in a quarter. It takes about two years, in my experience, and it is mostly made of a thousand small corrections to how you behave.

The companies that work this out will hold their best people while everyone else is losing them. The ones that do not will automate their way, very efficiently, into a business that nobody capable wants to join.