AI FOMO Is Not a Strategy

Interesting news item today on my local morning news show. The commentator gave an analysis of a technology focused, medical company, name with held, that late last year let 17% of it’s work force go and this month let another 23% go. That’s 40% in total. That’s a lot. So, what precipitated this major reduction in staff?

The commentator commented that the CEO of the company has said that it was due to the company’s adoption of AI. ‘Do tell’ I thought.

The commentator continued that the CEO had challenged his leaders to look at each position within the organization and decide if it is something that AI can do rather than a person. The result was that 40% of the staff under them could be replaced with AI.

Sounds like a good idea and extremely share holder friendly but I feel this could be a board room decision and is probably a flawed decision. I admit, I don’t have all the information so I’m basing my assessment on hunches and experience, but I think it is a good example of how things are going in the corporate world right now.

Before I get into it, I feel I should say AI is the future. There is no doubt to it, get ready or get run over. Truth is, I am not anti-AI in anyway, in fact, I highly recommend that organizations should embrace AI, but, my message is that embracing the technology should be done smartly not as AI Washing.

FYI, AI Washing is when an organization makes a decision that they need as much AI as they can get without any fore thought or planning, this essentially boils down to senior leaders saying something like ‘Our competitors are using AI, we need AI, get me as much AI as we can get. I don’t care what it is, just get me AI.’ with no thought put into planning and defining what the goal of implementing AI is. This is usually driven by the desire of the senior leader to sit in a Board of Directors or share holders meeting and proudly say some statement about the organization’s implementation of AI, something like ‘We have off loaded 40% of resources onto AI platforms for a cost saving of $$$.’ They would probably have an awesome slide to go with it.

If you are a business leader you should be thinking how can AI enhance my business and my staff, you should not be trying to satisfy a boards expectation and you should definitely not be pushing down the decision to staff members.

No names, but I know of one organization that told all staff to come up with 3 ways AI can help them get things done with a goal of reducing costs. People, that is not a plan, that is chaos. Without a plan and some coordination each staff member will pick whatever AI system they know about, not what will do the job best.

So, with that being said, let’s look at why the decision made be the technology focused, medical business is flawed and why the CEO should probably have held off his announcement. I suspect that they are doing an earnings report soon and needed to lay off 23% of their staff to be in the black, provide dividends and decided to use AI as a plausible explanation of how this will not destroy the business.

First, I see AI as a tool not a new resource replacement. This may change in the future as AI improves, but right now, I see AI as an enhancement for workers not a replacement. It should compliment the worker and increase their productivity, think of it as making your staff into super charged drivers of productivity, but keep in mind that it requires a plan this outcome does not happen naturally. Determine ahead of time what AI systems should staff use and how they will be trained to get the most out of them.

The CEO mentioned above stated that ‘New staff will need to be AI masters.’ But I reply that businesses need to build AI Masters on their AI systems, don’t expect that staff somehow understand your systems because they understand the principles of AI. There are thousands of AI powered systems in the wild, expecting staff to not require training is an issue I have seen in too many organizations. Do Accountants know every accounting system?

Secondly, in a recent post I wrote on the ‘Bias in the Machine: The Hidden Prejudices in AI’ I spoke about how AI systems can distort the truth based on the data used to ‘teach’ the AI and the weighting given to certain data and/or sources.

Knowing this, the question should be ‘Can we trust AI to make business decisions without human oversight?’. For me the answer is no. You can decide for yourself.

My recommendation, use AI for low level decision making but if you are letting it make the big decisions without human oversight, especially decisions that are viewable outside the organization, you may end up with a marketing nightmare that can destroy your brand. Don’t believe me? What would be the result if the AI tool suddenly has a strong bias similar to what happened to Grok. Grok suddenly started calling itself ‘MechaHitler’ and spouting racist propaganda in early July 2025. That could be embarrassing if you relied on the system and everything started to show a racist bias.

So, my advice is to ensure that your AI based/powered systems still have a human component that can oversee the output. At least until you are sure that it’s bias reflects your business.

Thirdly, don’t push AI adoption from the top down. The CEO mentioned above had charged his leadership to review each position through an AI lens. The problem here is that I would bet dollars to donuts, that each leader gets a bonus based on their cost savings which, for most businesses, means reducing the highest expense, which usually turns out to be staff.

So, I believe the scenario is top down with the CEO passing it to his leadership who in turn pushes it to their direct reports forcing the decision downwards until some middle manager makes a difficult decision, probably based on satisfying the leader above them. The results of the decision then rolls up and the CEO makes comments like ‘AI is enabling a 40% reduction in staff, look at all the money we are saving, we are so smart, bonuses for all senior leaders’.

I have seen this in many organizations over the years; it usually goes something like this. The senior leadership sits around a table and decide there should be a specific percent saving based on staff reduction or cost savings or some other money saving scheme to be implemented organization wide. They then pat themselves on the back and sleep soundly.

The implementation of the money saving scheme rolls down hill until someone makes it happen. The senior leadership then really feel like they are so smart, bonuses all around.

So is the leadership team the right group to be making these decisions and forcing the actual implementation downward. Remember, those below the senior leadership will ultimately make the decision because they want to make their leaders happy because they want to sit in their chair some day and get a bonus. Remember, most middle managers just want to make their leaders happy, so they stay off the hit list.

In the end, if you want to do AI right, empower someone to do it the right way. Look at processes and implement and design systems that enhance the work your team is doing and makes their output better and enables AI powered Data Driven Decision making. Having Data is great but informed analysis that interprets the data is significantly better. AI can do the analysis, but can you trust it? Should you trust it?

Finally, AI does not make anything new, AI uses data that it ‘learns’ to satisfy the prompt that ‘asks’ it for something, some output. For any company, not researching new products is akin to a death sentence. If you don’t innovate you die. So, any reliance on AI is a losing proposition for a leader. It sounds good in a Board meeting when you say that AI is driving our research and development. I’ve been in that meeting; everyone pats themselves on the back until six months later when there is nothing to show and your competitors are getting ahead of you. I suppose you could implement an AI system to fix that system and so on and so on.

So, my advice is to stop AI Washing and start planning for AI implementation with specific goals and paths to accomplish those goals based on reality not some unfounded expectation that AI systems will simply replace workers and save money, instead concentrate on your staff and empowering them to use AI to make them significantly more effective, essentially the senior leaders nirvana of getting more with the same resources.

Also, decide if you can trust your AI systems to make decisions and operate on their own. Some systems you will say yes but some will be a flat no. My unsolicited advice, make sure that all AI systems have some human oversight. Don’t just accept the output from AI systems. AI should enhance your staff, not replace them.

I had the opportunity to sit on a presentation by a staff member of an organization. They used AI to make the presentation slides, and they did not review it before hand. Big mistake. The slides did not match the point the presenter wanted to make, the AI system did its own ‘analysis’ and presented a contrary position to the presenter. So, which one is correct.

So, what do you think? Is the rush to the AI promised land worth get as much AI as you can as soon as you can or is it worth planning and making sure it will do what you expect it to do.

FYI, this was written with no AI support.