AI Productivity: How HR Can Kill Fake Work

For years, modern work has run on a quiet agreement: as long as everyone looks busy, we’ll call it productivity. Calendars stay full, decks get longer, reports multiply, and inboxes overflow.

The problem? No one seems to challenge to whether any of it moves the business forward.

AI is now breaking that agreement. When a machine can generate in seconds what used to take a team days, it doesn’t just make work faster. It makes some kinds of work look embarrassingly like BS.

Watch the full episode here: https://youtu.be/jQ2VD7wgBRg

After more than 20 years in HR and business leadership roles, it’s hard to ignore the pattern. People are rewarded for presence, not progress. Promotions go to the manager whose name shows up in every meeting invite, not the one who quietly fixes a revenue leak. AI is beginning to illuminate all the “productivity theater” that leaders have tolerated for decades.

The BS work has its days numbered.

The BS economy meets AI

Anthropologist David Graeber called them “bullshit jobs”. These are roles where, if a person stopped coming to work, few would notice and some might feel relieved. Fast Company’s article on the “BS economy” updates that idea for the AI era: entire layers of tasks and outputs that signal diligence without creating real value. These are the glossy annual reports, CEO letters, strategy decks, and status updates that AI can now churn out with uncanny fluency.

If an AI can generate your organization’s annual report in a few minutes, it raises an uncomfortable question about how substantive those artifacts were to begin with.

The same is true for many of the rituals that define white‑collar life: long meetings whose outcomes could fit in an email, performance reports no one reads, internal presentations more focused on design than decisions. When generative models replicate this work instantly, they reveal how much of it was designed to be seen, not to be used.

A 2023 analysis of AI and productivity from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that generative AI users report saving roughly 2.2 hours in a standard 40‑hour week. But when you zoom out to the whole workforce, the gain shrinks to around a 1.1% productivity lift.

If those reclaimed hours are simply redirected into more meetings, more reporting, and more status updates, AI is merely optimizing the BS economy.

What AI can’t do: choose what matters

In its current form, AI excels at the “how” of work and is largely indifferent to the “what” and the “why.” It can draft, summarize, translate, and re‑format at scale. It can remove grunt work from scheduling, documentation, and basic analysis. It can even synthesize themes from a meeting that, arguably, never needed to happen.

What it cannot do is decide which meetings are pointless. It cannot resolve the misalignment between a company’s stated strategy and the actual KPIs people are measured against. It cannot tell a leader:

• “This performance ritual is eroding trust,” or,

• “That reporting process exists mainly to demonstrate that someone is in control.”

Those are design choices about work, and they remain stubbornly human. Without deliberate redesign, AI becomes a mirror. It begins to reflect our organizational dysfunction back at us—now at higher speed and larger scale.

HR’s dilemma: scale dysfunction or dismantle it

This is where HR comes in, and where the stakes are highest. HR controls the architecture of work: job designs, performance systems, leadership expectations, and the cultural stories about what gets rewarded. I always defined my role as the chief responsible for the largest expense on the P&L and the largest asset producing revenue.

If HR continues to equate activity with contribution, AI will happily help scale that error. It will auto‑populate calendars, streamline performance documentation, and make it easier than ever to produce the artifacts of diligence. Leaders will see more dashboards, more reports, more “evidence” of effort but still wrestle with stagnant margins, flat engagement, and slow innovation.

For HR, this means moving beyond AI toolkits and workshops into something more fundamental: an operating model for talent that refuses to treat busyness as a definition of value.

Redesign, don’t repeat

AI has given leaders an unexpected gift: clarity. It reveals which activities were essentially decorative, which roles depended more on producing the appearance of work than on delivering results, and which rituals have long outlived their usefulness. It has also created an inflection point for HR. The function can either be the guardian of legacy busyness or the architect of a more honest, outcome‑driven workplace.

Here are four questions I always asked the organization to determine what was busywork and what was moving the needle towards profit:

1. What work would you stop if AI made it effortless?

2. What outcomes define success and are your metrics aligned at the people level?

3. Do your managers know how to recognize the real work that drives profit?

4. How much space and time does your current organization leave for deep work? (The time given to employees to stay out of meetings, email, and useless time sucks and actually DO THE WORK?)

If these are too strenuous, start with “What is this work for?” That is not a technical decision. It is a leadership one. And in most organizations, HR is closer to that question than any other function. So, the challenge and the transformation work sits with us.

The BS economy was built by humans. AI is merely shining a harsher light on it. You should see this as an opportunity for HR to step into the role the business has always wanted it to do: make people productive and profitable.

My simple advice: REDESIGN don’t REPEAT!