A particular silence follows the sentence, "I really want everyone leaning into AI this quarter." It is the silence of competent adults trying to decode a phrase delivered with the confidence of a directive and the content of a horoscope. We are meant to lean in, though the direction, the method, and the casualty we are expected to sacrifice to make room all go unmentioned, like the fine print on a timeshare.
We have done this before, in a slightly worse chair. The open-plan office was also going to change everything. A senior person read something thrilling on a flight, returned evangelized, and the walls were gone by the second quarter. Collaboration would bloom, serendipity would ambush us at the coffee machine, and ideas would collide midair like particles in a very expensive accelerator. What we got instead was noise-canceling headphones, a thriving black market in conference rooms, and a daily reminder of the door we used to be able to shut.
The AI directive has the same architecture. It rests on a top-down faith that the future has arrived, that it is good, and that we are the unfortunate obstacle between the company and it. The faith is sincere. It is also, in the technical sense, content-free. "Use AI more" lands the way "be more strategic" and "own the narrative" land, which is to say it is the kind of instruction issued by people who could not perform it under oath.
So the performance begins. A dashboard materializes to track adoption, because nothing certifies a spiritual revolution like a bar chart. A colleague starts opening every sentence with "I actually asked ChatGPT," in the tone of a man describing his sommelier. Somewhere after lunch you spend twenty-five minutes coaxing a chatbot to write an email you could have typed in four, and then, to your lasting shame, you thank it. The mandatory workshop, hosted by the office evangelist, manages to send everyone back to their desks more frightened than they arrived.
The unspoken part is that we are already doing it. Deloitte found roughly sixty percent of millennial and Gen Z employees working with AI, and only about a third feeling remotely trained to. The mandate is not a tool. It is a confession booth with a leaderboard. We were quietly drafting, summarizing, and second-guessing in the dark, and now we are asked to do it under stage lighting, with receipts, as though it has only just occurred to anyone.
The special comedy of this decade is that some of us are now the ones giving the speech. I have given a version of it, having nodded gravely at a sentence I did not understand and relayed it to a team that deserved a better caliber of nonsense. We launder fog into fog, call the result alignment, and beam certainty at one another in the most flattering light the building owns.
The women I have in mind are, inconveniently for everyone, excellent at the job. One of them built the thing, or runs the half of it that functions, or is the sole reason the client has not yet left. She has survived the rebrand, the reorg, the pivot, the second pivot, and an offsite that ended in a trust fall, and she can now tell a genuine transformation from a change of outfit inside ninety seconds with the sound off. None of this makes her cynical. It makes her experienced, which from the top floor is regularly mistaken for the same thing.
Her experience also tells her there is a genuinely useful twenty percent in the box. The technology is not the open-plan office. It is real, and the good part is actually good. The mandate is the open-plan office: a conviction with no instructions, a metric with no meaning, a liberation declared from above and shouldered, as ever, by whoever was already doing the lifting.
So she does the thing she always does, which is to pocket the useful twenty percent, fold it into a system she perfected three reorgs ago, and let the remaining eighty wash over her with the serenity of a woman who has outlasted every revolution ever announced by calendar invite and quietly euthanized by Friday. Her sentences will not open with "I actually asked ChatGPT." She will simply be better at her job by a margin nobody can locate on the dashboard, the way she has been the entire time.
The walls came down once, we adjusted, and within a few years leadership grew wistful about offices and rebuilt a handful of them at considerable expense. This will follow the identical script. The future will arrive, the dashboard will be quietly sunset, the evangelist will discover his next gospel, and the work will still need doing by the people who always knew how. They will have leaned in exactly as far as it paid to, not a degree further, and they will never once tell you how far that was.
