Things Abhijit Bhaduri Has Said on Podcasts

“When companies say that we are AI forward, I mean, you can't be AI forward and employee backward, so that's not going to work.” — Abhijit Bhaduri, We Fixed It, You're Welcome

Bhaduri argued that treating work as a pure transaction kills discretionary effort: fixing a problem nobody asked you to fix, or flagging an error nobody else noticed. That effort, he said, comes from feeling you belong to the organization.

We Fixed It, You're Welcome · 2026-10-20 Permalink → Listen →

We Fixed It, You're Welcome Around 16:43 into the episode

Melissa Eaton

…team and then the team not being productive enough, right? With AI, that they had to go back to those managers. Because again, like that's another whole, we could probably spend a whole nother episode and podcast on when you're asked to kind of take on this role again. What if you don't want to?

Aaron Wolpoff

That's true.

Abhijit Bhaduri

You know, one of the things I could sort of pipe in there and add that a lot of it, you know, when companies say that we are AI forward, I mean, you can't be AI forward and employee backward, you know, so that's not going to work. But you refer to something far more fundamental, that the belief is that work is only about money, that you do the work because you need to earn. I mean, you know, so the moment you take that kind of a perspective, you tend to view work as a transaction. That, I think, is a fundamental mistake because, you know, there are things you refer to so many of them. Think about it. Why do people who are teachers in schools who are doing things, you know, why do they work? They could do jobs which pay them much more. Why do they do that? Because it gives them meaning. You know, think about belonging that comes from work when you tell people, I belong to this organization. You have a sense of…

Aaron Wolpoff

Like the companies that say we're all in on AI, they have to keep that commitment. No one's saying AI. Sorry, we experimented with AI. I guess that's, you know, the human race is over it. We're doing something else now. They're still in it. But how do they keep sinking time, energy, commitment, and…

Abhijit Bhaduri

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Aaron Wolpoff

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Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

“AI is extremely good at making anything which is average… So the incompetent can become average, but the average can never become excellent.” — Abhijit Bhaduri, We Fixed It, You're Welcome

Abhijit Bhaduri on where the human work is left once AI raises the floor. His example: a phone camera makes an amateur's photos halfway decent, but the world's best photographers aren't jobless; people value them more.

We Fixed It, You're Welcome · 2026-10-20 Permalink → Listen →

We Fixed It, You're Welcome Around 46:33 into the episode

Aaron Wolpoff

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Speaker 1

…know, one response to what you were talking about, customer service, which is automated, there's nothing more frustrating than that, because if it is not that simple thing, give me the name of my bank account number, you know, for something as direct as that. Yes, anything slightly more nuanced,

Abhijit Bhaduri

…are now jobless? No, we value them more because we say, my God, I mean, look at the difference between what I can do with my cutting-edge phone versus somebody else. And it's the same moment. Why do their photos look so amazing? That's the difference because the minimum threshold of competence has gone to average. So you want to write using AI, it can become average extremely quickly. So the incompetent can become average, but the average can never become excellent. This is the human space that we need to acknowledge. So when you are looking at looking at work design, get the people to bring in their unique self. A good example of that is Scott Adams, who did create Dilbert. He used to say, there are a million people who understand business better than me. There are a million people who can draw better than me. But there's only one person who can combine…

Speaker 1

for it. Maybe it's not your past employer that's going to say, whoops, come on back. Or the next company over and down the road, maybe there's a whole different path that you're going to just create, create this value and buzzer on yourself and then figure it out for yourself. And maybe the company…

Abhijit Bhaduri

So if they check certain boxes with their hiring initiatives, with their commitment to people and career development, if they take an AI pledge that says, yes, AI is part of our strategy for the foreseeable future, not going anywhere. And here are three things we'll never do. You know, we will…

Melissa Eaton

I think we got started. I think there's some other things that we talked about today that I think are really important. I think definitely separating the AI tasks from the actual role are really important. I also think that we need to protect the leadership pipeline as a strategic asset and…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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