Everywhere you look, there is a panic button being pushed. “AI is coming!” “The robots will take our jobs!” “We need to automate everything immediately!”
And because of this panic, leaders are doing something dangerous. They are staring at the shiny new tools—ChatGPT, Midjourney, Copilot—and thinking, “This is my secret weapon.” They think if they just bolt enough AI onto their company, they will suddenly become invincible.
But here is the hard truth: You cannot code your way out of a culture problem.
We are seeing a massive shift in the business world right now where we are outsourcing the most important parts of our business to algorithms that don’t interact and collaborate. We are leaning on technology in places where only a human should sit.
It’s creating three specific problems that I see happening in companies right now—problems that are going to blow up in their faces if they aren’t careful.
We are seeing this in different examples in companies that we interact with right now—problems that are going to blow up in their faces if they aren’t careful.
1. The “Vibe-coding” Trap
Developers are using AI to generate entire blocks of code instantly. It feels like magic. You can build a product in a week instead of a year. But here’s the catch: When that code breaks (and it will), nobody knows how it works. There is no Tacit Knowledge. You have a house of cards built by a robot that no human understands. That isn’t efficiency; that’s a liability.
2. The “Bot” Project Manager
We are letting AI track our work items and manage our workflows. It’s great at Gantt charts. But it is terrible at “reading the room.” It doesn’t know that Sarah is burned out. It doesn’t know that the client is lying about the deadline. It only sees the data, not the drama. You need people with Social Capital to navigate the messy reality of human beings, not just a spreadsheet of tasks.
3. The “Yes Man” Syndrome
Leaders are turning to AI for strategy. The problem? AI is designed to be helpful. It wants to agree with you. It’s the ultimate “Yes Man.” If you ask an AI if your idea is good, it will give you ten reasons why it is. What you lose is Dissent. You lose the person in the room who is brave enough to say, “This is a bad idea.” That disagreement is often the only thing between you and a disaster.
Don’t get me wrong—I love technology (you should see my office!). But we are getting it backwards. We are treating the code as the asset and the people as the cost.
That is backwards.
Your code base is just a tool. Your cloud storage is just a rental. The only true asset you have—the only thing that cannot be copied, automated, or commoditized—is the relationships inside your teams.
In this series, we’re going to talk about why the power is in your people. Not your tech. So join us as we dive into this series! Oh, and we want your feedback!