“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.”
We Fixed It, You're Welcome · October 2026
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.
Transcript
…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?
That's true.
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…
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…
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