The general public’s discomfort with AI is well-documented and growing. The tech industry thinks we should all be clamoring for what it’s offering, and most people… aren’t. A Gallup poll found 31% of Gen Z is angry about AI, and 51% are anxious about it.
I use AI every day. It’s found its product-market fit as a business tool. That’s how I interact with it: in a work context. I’m sure it would be the same, even if I were working for a company and not self-employed.
I’m not naive about the risks. The environmental concerns are real. Data centers are wildly unpopular, expensive, and may have unknown health risks. The over-hype is real, and a bubble may still be looming. But the tool itself is useful as a business tool. The genie isn’t going back in the bottle, and my stance is that we have to figure out how to live with it — like every other technology revolution.
This relationship between me and technology goes back more than 20 years. I’m also not new to people’s pushback. It was literally my job to convince people to try something new for a large portion of my career.
Yet I feel significant tension in writing and talking about something that is genuinely useful and also poses enormous threats to people, both their jobs and potentially all of humanity. I’m angry beyond belief at how companies are rolling it out and how it’s impacting employees.
And so I wanted to explore my longstanding career that’s been built on finding ways to use technology and how AI is both “just another chapter” and “fundamentally different.
Then and now: what’s changed
My first job was working as a bank teller at a community bank in my hometown. I stayed at the job through college, eventually working as a mortgage underwriter in the 2003/2004 era. Interest rates had dropped, people were refinancing like crazy, and the loan officers were overwhelmed. I offered to help, which involved learning a bunch of new software.
The following year, the bank decided to digitize all of its paper loan files. At the time, this wasn’t common. Most banks still relied on enormous file cabinets of paper files. But I, along with a few other college students, was assigned the task of sending paper documents through a desktop scanner.
It was unbelievably tedious work. And at first, it seemed like brainless work. But I quickly realized a problem: inconsistency. Each college student organized the digital files in different folders, with different names. Loan officers couldn’t find anything in the digital version. As a result, the loan officers wouldn’t use the digital copy, and would pull out the paper file.
And I set out to fix the problem. I came up with an organization system and naming convention. Once the already-scanned files were fixed, I advocated that the paper files be moved so that the officers couldn’t rely on paper: they’d be forced to use the digital version. Eventually, everyone accepted the change.
After college, I went to work for the company that made the bank software I’d been using. I helped other banks implement digital loan files, along with other loan management tools. One of the final products I worked on (later as a product manager) was a tool that could automatically recognize the data from a bank customer’s tax return and analyze it, saving bank staff from repetitive data entry.
I saw software as a way to solve a problem: large banks have nearly unlimited resources for all types of tasks. Small banks don’t. Automation lets smaller organizations compete with larger ones. They don’t have to spend time on the boring, repetitive work and can instead focus on relationships with customers.
That core principle came with me when I started my own business. I knew I could do more if things simply hummed along in the background. I could focus on client work instead of things like “organizing files” or “manually creating checklists of fifteen items.” One of my friends joked, “I didn’t know how you could do the work of ten tireless humans. Then I realized all the systems that you have running in the background.”
And then along came AI.
AI: Different and yet the same
The current framing of AI is dominated by either hype (”AI will replace everything!”) and backlash (”AI is terrible, and I refuse to use it, ever”). There’s a third position that doesn’t get a lot of attention: people, like myself, who have found ways to make work easier.
Here’s a specific example: One of my clients gave me a spreadsheet of 27 rows. Each row contained some changes that they wanted to make to blog posts, with the changes embedded as bullet points within a cell. The final deliverable back to the client wouldn’t be a spreadsheet: it needed to be a Google Doc of the changes. So I had Claude extract the data from the spreadsheet and put it in a Google Doc for me. That took about one minute. If I had to do it manually, it would have taken at least an hour, maybe more, to do all of the formatting.
That’s the “genuinely useful” category. There’s no glory or anything to be gained in me manually formatting a giant Google Doc. The client is paying me for the writing and editing, not my ability to copy/paste from a spreadsheet.
That’s where I see similarities between the anti-AI position and what I heard throughout my career implementing software. Refusal to use AI is giving up legitimate ways to make work easier. I compare it to the example of extracting data from tax returns when I worked on bank software. The process of keying in numbers was just repetitive, manual work. Interpreting the numbers was part that required a human.
Where I feel the tension most, as I write about AI, is that my experience is not the same as most of corporate America. I have the freedom to explore and find what works for me (and what doesn’t work). Many companies are taking an iron-fist approach and insist that employees “use AI”… without providing any guidance.
And that is the disconnect. I know from experience that a free-for-all doesn’t work. Not everyone has a “software brain” and can immediately see how to use software to do work differently. They need to be given step-by-step instructions.
This is further compounded because AI has a much less obvious path than automation tools. Automation typically follows a specific process: if one thing happens, then this other thing happens. AI is much more open, like my spreadsheet example. That’s a thing I needed one time, and will probably never need again. It’s not a repeatable process. Yet I reached for AI as a tool in my toolbox, knowing that it could do what I needed.
What companies should be doing is providing specific training. That’s always the key to successful software implementation. I used to train a small group of “cheerleaders” within a bank. They would, in turn, figure out how to apply the software to their specific processes. And then they would train everyone else on the specifics.
Instead, CEOs are yelling, “Figure it out!” while simultaneously saying, “You will be evaluated on your use of AI on your upcoming performance review!”
On an episode of Decoder, Dr. Adam Dubé said the following about AI in education:
There’s some research that looks at school climates and teachers who get demotivated for their use of generative AI in education and what causes demotivation. And for them, it was being forced to use these systems when there was a top-down rule that you had to use generative AI…That is demotivating for educators. They don’t like being told which tools to use because it feels like it’s removing their autonomy. And so whenever we remove workers’ autonomy or their own sense, basically their control over their own work environment, people get demotivated.
Automation very clearly removes boring and tedious work. But AI is often a push (from the top) to replace creative work. Or to simply “create more!” without answering the question, “But why are we creating more…?”
That’s where companies are getting it wrong. They’re applying AI to the wrong use cases, and why people working with these scenarios are resisting (and demotivated). It shouldn’t be used to replace the parts of work that people find fulfilling. Yet that’s the push in the attempt to squeeze every last drop from worker capabilities.
This is why my feelings around AI are complicated. I’ve seen exactly how it saves time and effort. And I think most companies are doing it wrong, and workers have a right to feel frustrated by the threats to their jobs because their employers are trying to apply AI to everything, instead of the right things.
I think a “never AI” stance is going to leave some people — especially small or solo businesses — struggling to keep up. They simply won’t be able to keep up with people who do things like “use AI to save a few hours formatting a spreadsheet.”
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