[00:00:00] Welcome to Corporate Fuckery, stories of Survival, psychological Warfare, and choosing What's best for you. I'm Lauren Delia, certified success coach, subconscious strategist, astrologer Technologist, and former corporate insider turned truthteller. Today we are going to explore three things, what AI really is. How the productivity myth is costing us more than we think, and the real future of work. Let's start here. They're calling AI the future of work, but what if the future of work is less Jetsons and more exploitation with a user interface? This episode is for every high achieving person who's poured decades into being irreplaceable, only to now feel the quiet panic of being replaced by a glorified chatbot that literally tells you at the bottom of the screen, this might be wrong information.
We're not here to fear monger, throw shade, [00:01:00] trash talk, but we are here to name the false promise being sold and reclaim a deeper truth, and that is this. You are the original intelligence. AI is just a tool. It's not a threat, at least not yet. It's not your replacement. It's not a silver bullet. It's just a tool one we can use with intention or be used by unconsciously.
And if you spent your career building trust, solving hard problems, mentoring others, and becoming the go-to person, it makes sense. You'd have a feeling here because no one taught us how to grieve the slow erosion of our expertise. Or how to navigate the fear that what we know and who we are might no longer be enough.
Contrary to popular thought, AI doesn't actually think it predicts. It's called a large language model or an LLM. There's nothing actually intelligent about it yet, but it is [00:02:00] pretty damn impressive on how it organizes data and information. It's also not creative. It's combinational and takes information from the past and puts it into different configurations and spits out a new answer.
I like to think of AI like a fashion stylist with amnesia. It walks into your closet, grabs a handful of pieces you've already worn and arranges them based on past outfits. It's seen on Pinterest. Sometimes it totally nails the vibe. Other times you walk out looking like ET and time traveled from a different decade or fashion isn't your thing.
AI is like a sous chef who's never tasted food. They can chop, prep and plate, but they don't actually know if the dish is any good. It's fast, but it has no sense of what flavor actually is. What makes it powerful isn't knowledge. It's its ability to sound confident. Think about that for just a hot second.
How [00:03:00] unwaveringly confident your chatbot is, even when you know it's totally wrong. And the hard truth is that confidence is costing people's jobs. We need to be real about this. AI may evolve into something truly intelligent in the future, and that could be incredible, but right now it's not that smart.
It's a pattern recognition machine, not a strategic thinker, and it doesn't understand ethics or people or purpose. So when we replace humans based on tools that we know can make mistakes, that's not innovation. That's recklessness. And here's the most important distinction.
AI is predictive, not proactive. It pulls from what has been not what could be. In my opinion, only humans can create a future that has never existed before. Innovation requires vision, intuition, and the kind of risk taking no algorithm can replicate. That's not just job security, that's creative [00:04:00] leadership, and that's irreplaceable.
So why isn't anyone saying. Shit, work into your AI equals shit work out of your ai. Entire organizations are pretending like most of their business isn't still run on spreadsheets or CRMs that aren't connected to larger systems. In some of the largest tech forward environments, there are meetings where leaders are declaring the future of work as citizen development that everyone needs to get curious. Start experimenting. Learn how to write your own AI agent. For anyone wondering, citizen development means everyday employees, not engineers, build tools or automation using low-code, no-code platforms to solve real problems in real time. I tried it, and guess what? In order to demo my revolutionary AI chatbot, I had to start. From a spreadsheet, I had to tie the whole damn thing together with a spreadsheet . I spent [00:05:00] months trying to make it work. Internal messaging suggested it was a plug and play. Spoiler alert, it wasn't. That's the problem. Decisions are being made without context. Executives are gambling with billion dollar businesses using tools labeled this may contain inaccurate information.
It's not innovation, it's wishful thinking . it is crossing your fingers and hoping your GPT can run your operations. And let's not forget, mass layoffs framed as efficiency, have downstream consequences. They hollow out communities, reduce consumer spending, shake market confidence, and burn out the remaining workforce.
This isn't just bad for culture, it's bad for the economy.
This isn't a rant from the sidelines. I've lived my entire career as a certified business architect, continuous improvement junkie and metrics queen turn technologist. I [00:06:00] started in pharmaceutical manufacturing and quality assurance in like 2004, let's say. You can go back and look at my resume on LinkedIn if you want.
If you're not aware, that's like being the cookie tester, making sure the recipe and all the testing that goes with it is made in a repeatable, reliable way. We built systems back then, assuming that the human would make a mistake, we documented everything from what color pen you could use in a standard operating procedure.
And had binders, yes, binders full of paperwork back then for people to follow. Word for word to ensure everyone performed the action in the exact same way , and we protected for that. Training checks, double checks, triple checks, because when you're making medicine, you want humans involved.
Next up my tenure at Nordstrom, my first exposure to actual business architecture, which include capabilities and business as a cohesive system. We use [00:07:00] language like lean, six Sigma Kaizen, we optimized for efficiency between the business and technology.
We had rich conversations about investment productivity metrics against our $600 million spend and the outcomes the organization was driving to. And to be honest, it seemed really meaningful. Like the employees were making a difference to cut the waste. But now.
We've started to market the human as the ultimate inefficiency, which is true. We are in fact, flawed by design, but thinking that we're going to replace humans and calling that innovation leaves a gaping hole in the current market narrative, humans are good at pattern recognition and bringing unique ideas and concept together due to nuance lived experience, imagination, and creativity.
AI is good at the lather, rinse, repeat approaches to life and business and can create efficiency and scalability faster than a human can, which [00:08:00] makes it expansive by this definition. The problem is it sounds good in boardrooms and to investors, but on the ground, in the hallways at work, it doesn't quite work the way that it's being marketed. I wanna be clear, again, this isn't an anti-tech episode. I take a lot of pride in being a technologist, but I take more pride in being pro-human. I desire for all of us to think of AI as a human first. Opportunity to be human first in AI means, number one, we use it to lighten our cognitive load, not replace our critical thinking. It should replace burnout, not erase people. It should support your zone of genius, not threaten it. It's important to note that people bring facets of perspective from other industries and experiences that AI would never consider on its own, and our need to respect the subject matter [00:09:00] experts and the rich perspectives and leadership they bring to their work and the culture of an organization can't be replicated.
I use ai. In fact, I love ai. I've loved AI for a long time. It helps me brainstorm, summarize, ideate. It's my assistant, it's not my North Star. If you're using AI to go faster instead of get clearer. You're missing the point. You might be using AI wrong if you're outsourcing your judgment, if you're skipping the strategy for speed.
If you think it's going to fix broken leadership systems, if you believe it's better to reduce headcount in the name of slapping a new automation flow together that hasn't been road tested for the results that you desire. Look, I'm all about creating efficiency. My entire professional career has been built on that.
Let that land. I'd love to know just by this point of our conversation today, how you think about ai. [00:10:00] Because I know you, you are the one who always showed up early, stayed late, over-delivered. You didn't just wanna see it at the table. You built the whole damn table and now you feel the edge. You feel like you might be replaced by a machine that doesn't even know if it's right.
That dis-ease that discomfort. That's not paranoia. That's intuition. It's not enough to feel weird about ai. You have to engage with it. You have to understand it. You have to shape how it's used before someone else does, because silence is complicity, and inaction is automation. This is about personal responsibility to make AI human first, to ensure we lead it not the other way around.
This. This is corporate fuckery. When executives prioritize buzzwords over people, when layoffs are disguised as innovation, when spreadsheets become [00:11:00] your leadership strategy, you deserve better and so does the future of our work. So if you're wondering how to tame that fear, let's start here.
Number one, get curious. Play with AI tools. Learn what they can do and they can't do. Number two, use them to amplify your brilliance, not bypass your value. Please, please help them reduce your cognitive load. Number three, advocate in the rooms you're in. Ask the hard questions. What problem are we actually solving?
Are we designing for people or just for profit? Reminder, you are the original intelligence you feel. You sense you guide, you lead. You hold the nuance ai, it's the tool, but you are the one who gives it directions. Don't let a system that guesses better than most convince you that it knows better than you and to the leaders listening.
I challenge you to get human first before you get legacy [00:12:00] lost, because here's the real kicker. If I were in that boardroom, I'd be the one raising my hand saying, is this really innovation? Or are we just automating our ignorance, calling it progress and praying? No one notices until the architecture collapses, and we're thinking AI is gonna keep the lights on.
If AI is the frontier, then leading with humanity must be the compass. So here's my challenge to you, especially if you're in a decision making seat. Call out the AI corporate fuckery when you see it. Don't let language like efficiency, innovation, or digital transformation distract you from the human impact.
Take radical responsibility when it lands on your desk or in your inbox. Ask better questions. Push back on the assumption that faster is better and cheaper is smarter. Lead with intention, not automation. You don't have to be a CEO to shape the [00:13:00] future. You just have to be brave enough to speak up. The future of work will be built with people in mind or with people left behind.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk on this today. I hope I made you consider a different perspective of AI that you can take an active role in. This is one of many conversations we're gonna have on this podcast about this topic, and I look forward to having experts come in and share their own opinions on how we can reduce corporate fuckery and take a more human centered approach. Until next time, remember, you're not alone, you're not behind, and we are just getting started.
