Beware the AI Productivity Theatre

Productivity Theatre refers to the sad state of affairs where visible activity is mistaken for valuable activity. In the old days, this would be endless meetings being held and lengthy memos going back and forth without ever deciding anything.

In the days of AI, it means having impressive workflows using multiple models, taking inputs from one source, transforming them in some way and moving them somewhere else, without anything of consequence being tied to those artifacts: It's cool that I can have a meeting recorded, transcribed, and summarized, and the summary emailed to every participant, and maybe even action items pulled out and already assigned. But what ultimately matters is whether the things actually get done (if they were worth doing in the first place).

It gets worse when the workflow becomes truly performative. That's the CEO running a "virtual company of 42 agents" complete with their own org chart, churning out everything from marketing copy to the annual strategy. The amount of value generated from these teams of agents is approximately zero because it's all detached from reality.

The problem with using AI to make decisions is that, lacking personality and embodied real-world experience, the AI will support any position and any decision if you word the question appropriately: Should we acquire that company or not? ChatGPT will go along with whatever answer you lead it to.

Just as writers should embrace the friction and discomfort of working on a blank page, leaders need to embrace the discomfort of making decisions with incomplete information in an uncertain environment. There's no substitute for living through that, and just asking Claude what you should do will have disastrous consequences.