Technology and Innovation Community

Hello Community!
Lots of interesting posts recenlty - do engage, share your thoughts. Let's help each other to understand the challenges and move forward.

This article from Fast Company caught my eye today. Here's the brief review of the article:

AI is revealing a hard truth about modern work: much of it doesn't need to exist. While tools like ChatGPT and Copilot boost individual productivity, they rarely improve company performance. This disconnect points to a deeper issue-the prevalence of "BS jobs", a term coined by anthropologist David Graeber to describe roles that are fundamentally pointless, even to those doing them. What Is the BS Economy?

• Performative Work: Jobs that prioritize optics over outcomes-like endless meetings, status updates, and reports no one reads.
• Institutionalized Inefficiency: Bureaucratic rituals that inflate headcount and slow progress without adding value.
• Hyper-normalization: Everyone knows the system is broken, but no one imagines an alternative-so it persists.

AI isn't yet replacing most jobs-it's mimicking the symbolic layer of work: polishing presentations, summarizing meetings, drafting emails. This exposes how formulaic and hollow many tasks are. If AI can generate an annual report complete with a CEO letter, it raises the question: was it ever meaningful?

The Opportunity for Leaders To truly benefit from AI, organizations must:

1. Redesign Work: Focus on outcomes, eliminate tasks that exist only to justify presence.
2. Reskill Managers: Shift from compliance to coaching and human leadership.
3. Rethink Performance: Reward contribution and impact, not optics or volume.
4. Experiment & Learn: Treat AI transformation as a cultural shift, not a tech upgrade.

AI can help us fix work, but only if we're willing to confront the nonsense it exposes. The real value lies in liberating human potential-creativity, empathy, strategic thinking-not in automating busywork.

So do we think that this AI brings the erah of decisive, ruthless (or brave?), no BS-economy type of leaders? How does this resonate with what you are experiencing at your organisation?

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Aya Pariy
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Hi Aya, you are touching on a pet topic, the existential nature of work and workers, with your reference to David Graeber. Summary here for our community friends: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/25/bullshit-jobs-a-theory-by-david-graeber-review

We maddeningly keep the B.S. workflows because that is how the circulatory and nervous system of corporate bodies are setup. And the way the modern corporate body works arguably stems from the inheritance of layers of managerial hierarchies of soldiers returning from World War II. Pre-war industrial organisation structures were flatter and more literally aligned with the nature of the activity going on, say, on the manufacturing floor. Anyway, management layers love B.S. work because it justifies the layers that justify their jobs. 

Personally, my experience is that only AI-native companies can hope to do things differently from the get-go. Like, literally, company was born post-2022 and was full-on AI from the start. Everybody else is too entrenched to rip up the playbook; they will change more slowly, using AI for efficiency. Aka version 2.0 of off-shoring: de-layer middle management and use AI to enhance the producers doing whatever they are already doing. E.g., what our community is experiencing IRL in the finance industry, or Google cutting 35% of manager roles: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-has-slashed-more-manager-roles-in-its-efficiency-drive-2025-8 

There will be another opportunity to challenge dumb workflows when we are allowed to properly unleash AI agents in the workforce because people have to design the agents and hopefully those people will ask, "why do we have to do this??".

The irony we may find in the future is that we find there is no great utopia for the masses, where they have fulfilling work, etc., because to feel fulfilled in an AI-expectant world, you have to master it, and most people are not capable. But, as we have already seen with the voting patterns of the US elections, people don't want to feel superfluous and unwanted. They become discontent and take action. So maybe we will find B.S. jobs persist to keep people busy; busy people keep velocity of income in the economy; a functioning economy keeps society from imploding on itself. That is a massive political and policy conundrum. 

(Incidentally, this is a great trigger topic for contemplating "how to invest for the world in 2030". Tons of thought pieces out there, for a fast read Schroders: https://www.schroders.com/en-gb/uk/intermediary/insights/15-what-ifs-for-the-year-2030/)

hi Kara, thank you, lots of ideas and lots to thing about. Existential themes I'd say.

Keen to hear from others.

Have a great no b.s. workflow week everyone!

I cannot help but think about this existential theme.

Here's a bit of amusement from me. 1 page dialogue between Socrates and Plato on what is worth doing and why? Are we wise enough indeed to build a new economy founded not on apperances, but on truth?

Authorship: Aya Pariy, Microsoft Co Pilot

Jokes aside, really keen to hear from other members on how your life and job is impacted by this quick technology adoption. What does your future look like?

Attachment(s)

Socrates and the Shadow of Work.docx   288 KB 1 version