Short answer: yes.
Longer answer: it depends on how you respond.
Throughout my career, I’ve been optimistic about people and business. I’ve hired and worked with high performers, helped motivated contributors grow, and managed out low effort or low impact roles when necessary. AI doesn’t replace that belief; it sharpens it.
AI has implications across every level of an organization but accountability, expectations, and impact look different at each level. Framing AI purely as a cost-reduction exercise, similar to past waves of “we must outsource overseas”, misses its real value. In both cases, the risk isn’t efficiency; it’s the erosion of ownership over thinking, systems, and code. The real opportunity isn’t replacement, it’s better leverage, better decisions, and higher-impact work driven by teams who truly own what they build.
C-Suite
C-level leaders who approach AI with intention—and connect it to real efficiency and growth—will stay ahead. Simply investing in AI isn’t enough; without a clear plan, it’s hard to translate spend into value. As boards mature in their understanding of AI, execution and outcomes matter more than signaling.
Middle Management
Managers are the group best positioned to translate AI into real execution. That requires understanding the actual work, effort, and tradeoffs their teams face. For many organizations, this represents a meaningful shift from where middle management has trended over the past two decades—away from abstraction and back toward hands-on leadership. Without that context, performance assessment, prioritization, and coaching quickly break down.
Individual Contributors
When it comes to individual contributors, AI is creating three very different paths:
- The Resisters: People who choose not to learn or use AI tools will increasingly be outpaced by those who do. Not because they’re less capable—but because the baseline for productivity is changing.
- The Gamers: Those who adopt, but operate at ~80%. Some people use AI to look busy rather than be effective—stretching small tasks into large ones or optimizing for appearances. This might work briefly, but it’s fragile. Over time, output and impact still tell the real story. These are likely your upper left employees on your 4 or 9 box assessments.
- The Multipliers: The real advantage goes to people who use AI to improve quality, speed, and judgment—freeing time to solve harder problems and create more value. These are the contributors who raise the bar for everyone. These are likely your upper right employees on your 4 or 9 box assessments.
AI doesn’t reward “effort theater”. It rewards clarity, ownership, and results.
AI isn’t here to eliminate people. It’s here to compress effort, amplify judgment, and raise the bar on what “good” actually means. Avoiding it carries risk but so does assuming leverage reduces expectations. In reality, it changes where time and thinking should be spent.
The opportunity isn’t to work less. It’s to create more value with clearer accountability.
If you’re serious about using AI beyond the buzzwords, this is where we are trying to help our clients:
- Designing infrastructure that supports custom AI integrations (not vendor lock-in demos)
- Getting your data actually ready for AI (most data isn’t ready)
- Identifying real areas of leverage where AI can move revenue, margin, or speed
- Evaluating acquisitions where AI can meaningfully increase enterprise value, not just the slide count
- AI tool selection informed by business discovery
- Structuring codebases for agentic development—documented and modular enough to enable AI-assisted coding without hitting context limits
- Creating system diagrams that are legible to both humans and AI agents, so understanding scales as fast as the code
If any of that resonates, let’s talk. If not, enjoy the theater.
(em dashes intentional)