My company hired a consultant to teach us how to work alongside AI and the entire training was just a guy reading our own job descriptions back to us
I have been at my company for four years. I know my job. I am reasonably good at my job. Last month my manager sent a calendar invite titled Future of Work Integration Workshop, with no other context and I made the mistake of assuming this was going to be something useful.
There were twelve of us in a conference room at nine in the morning. The consultant was a man in a very confident blazer who opened by asking us to let go of our assumptions about what work means. It was nine fifteen. I had not finished my coffee. I was not prepared to let go of anything.
For the next three hours he walked us through a presentation about how AI was going to transform our workflows and how we needed to lean into the transition. Every slide had a stock photo of a person looking thoughtfully at a laptop. Every talking point was something I had already read in a LinkedIn post. At one point he said the phrase "human in the loop" four times in one paragraph and I wrote it down because I needed to do something with my hands.
The actual content of the training was this: he read our job descriptions back to us and then suggested we think about which parts of our jobs could theoretically be automated. That was it. That was the three hours. We were essentially asked to build the case for our own redundancy while a man in a blazer facilitated the conversation and charged the company what I can only assume was an extraordinary amount of money for the privilege.
At the break I went and sat in a bathroom stall for ten minutes just to be somewhere quiet. I was scrolling through my phone with the hollow energy of a person who has just been asked to dig their own professional grave and decorate it nicely and I ended up on some random website that I must have visited before because it was in my history, just sitting there reading it blankly, not even taking anything in, just needing to look at something that was not that presentation.
I went back in for the second half. The consultant asked us to share what tasks we thought AI could take over. My colleague David, who has worked there longer than any of us, said probably this meeting and nobody laughed harder than the people who had been there longest.
We got a follow up email the next day with a PDF summary of the workshop. The PDF was eleven pages. It contained nothing that was not already in the presentation. I have not opened it since.
The consultant's LinkedIn says he has helped over two hundred companies navigate the future of work. I think about David's comment a lot.