Nothing Much Ado

We have this corporate comms lady named Paula Breckenbok who got super pissed at the Heroic Leadership Team for falling asleep at the wheel when it comes to making our organization something called “AI-Ready.”

Like, super pissed.

To the degree that last week she walked in on our Executive Boardroom Wednesday Weekly Bruncheon—where we exclusively devour chicken ‘n waffles because oh my God the syrup and the salt and the juice it’s like outrageous gluttony on display—and literally threw our 74-page Executive Do-AI-Now-Roadmap™ at Paul McCann, our interim Chief Operating Officer, who subsequently spilled his Mimosa all over his Hugo Boss Hesten Flannel Extra Slim Fit Suit.

Which, admittedly, we enjoyed because while Paul has good intentions, that kind of suit comes off as taking oneself too seriously…at least around here.

And Paula has every right to be pissed. We wrote our Executive Do-AI-Now-Roadmap™ almost three years ago to-the-day, as a completely panicked response to ChatGPT’s explosion.

The echoes of that distraught, April 15, 2023, Leadership Team conversation in our Executive Masters’ Boardroom still reverberate through these storied halls. Literally, we can hear it…it’s creepy:

Derek: What’s it called?

Lindsey: ChatGPT.

Paul: What?

Lindsey: It’s called ChatGPT.

Mike: What the hell is a GPT is that AI?

Zeus: No dude, calm down.

Richard: What about our investors? The money!

Zeus: Okay okay calm down.

Anthony: Hey, I don’t understand, it’s called ChatGPT? That’s a dumb name. It has a lot of syllables, and that needless requirement for capitalization. And, I mean, it’s not an empty vessel ready to hold our story about the brand.

Zeus: Shut up Anthony, don’t make this about marketing you always do that.

Mike: I’m going to puke chicken ‘n waffles if we keep talking about this.

Zeus: Everyone, everyone, look, it’s just a new thing okay? Let’s just talk about it. And we saw this coming, that’s why we are ready to write our Executive Do-AI-Now-Roadmap™.

Derek: Well what does ChatGPT do?

Lindsey: It basically makes it so you can write a coherent email, but like super fast. Fast email.

Derek: That’s it? Cool. Hey that’s good! This place sucks at email!

Lindsey: Plus it finds stuff for you like Google. So, you know, best screwdriver repair guy in your zip code and the like.

Paul: I need that!

Mike: But it’s just the beginning. Experts predict it by 2026 can do the work of 11,000 people in forty minutes. Untold possibility. It’s going to change everything. No more forklift drivers, no more free delivery pizza deliverers. No more zoos or teachers. They will all be dead.

Derek: Jesus Mike are you okay you look pale. Wait, is that a Hugo Boss suit like Paul’s?

Zeus: We got to start using ChatGPT before other companies do!

Derek: Okay! Like, just start using it? Is it free?

Richard: Hahaha oh my god “free” that’s great.

Carol: Wait, why “before other companies?”

Zeus: Because if we’re last we’re screwed. We’ll be sitting here like morons with hundreds of employees when we only need like two.

Carol: But isn’t that kind of what makes this whole thing work, you know, the people here?

Derek: Oh wait lunch is here. Sweet.

Paul: Thank you.

Lindsey: Thank you yum.

Paul: Hey! They put Swiss on my burger? Take this back!

Zeus: Paul it can’t go back it’s Uber Eats. Okay, for the people-being-important thing, you’re probably right but there’s no time to think. We got to get on this. Paula, what do you think? Can you work with Gabrielle and execute The Official AI Digital Tranformatrix Company-Wide Assimilation Project®? That will be Phase Alpha of our forthcoming Executive Do-AI-Now-Roadmap™.

Paula: Ah, Gabrielle? Isn’t she at home with the ankle monitor? I think she stole someone’s identity again.

Zeus: Yes, Gabrielle. Call legal, go break her out. Use a file or something. You have five weeks to make and deliver The Official AI Digital Tranformatrix Company-Wide Assimilation Project®, then six more to get everyone here using ChatGPT for everything. I mean everything. Especially immoral stuff.

Paula: I really don’t need the first six weeks, I can execute The Official AI Digital Tranformatrix Company-Wide Assimilation Project® in like a week. I mean, I’ll just use ChatGPT you know? All I need is a general idea of what’s in Phase Alpha of your Executive Do-AI-Now-Roadmap™. Even just an outline, or you can ad lib it to me right now.

Zeus: No no, six months, then six months to rollout. That’s a totally realistic and reasonable timeline. Then the long-term goal is that by 2026 we’ll be 100% AI-ChatGPT focused.

Anthony: Ah, AI-ChatGPT? It’s just ChatGPT, and it isn’t “AI” in and of itself. It’s a—

Zeus: Shut up Anthony, don’t make this about marketing you always do that.

Nothing Much Ado

So clearly we were inspired to take action. And action we did!

1.     Paula delivered The Official AI Digital Tranformatrix Company-Wide Assimilation Project® in six weeks. Although we demanded revisions, which nobody accounted for timewise, and those took another three months with all the back and forth.

2.     Once that was done, we formed a subcommittee without telling Paula—and revamped her plan on invite-only secret Zoom calls over the course of five months—which totally changed the plan to make it more agreeable to potential investors, Wall Street Analysts, and our The Board Members®…you know, because of the money.

3.     Then it took about four months to agree on Our Plan Execution Matrix™. Who knew we weren’t aligned?

4.     Then suddenly we realized summer PTO season was coming up and Ted had that late fall trip planned to Majorca, so we delayed launch for five months. But that’s okay, it was execution time, and man, do we know how to do that. In stages of course.

5.     Stage 1, November 2024: Company-wide Slack announcement. “The Art Of AI ChatGPT Mandatory Bootcamp happening soon! Stay on this channel for updates.”

6.     Stage 2, “The Art Of AI ChatGPT Mandatory Bootcamp” scheduled for January 2025 after several false starts thanks to those lawsuits popping up again. Attendance rate: very impressive. Energy: high. Quick reference guides distributed. Use case shared. AI glossary published to internal webpage. “Lean in” repeatedly used in all official “The Art Of AI ChatGPT Mandatory Bootcamp” comms.

7.     March 2025: Action items distributed — every employee should have set up ChatGPT AI-thing with role context by now, identified repetitive weekly tasks, saved the prompts that worked, and shared results in AI Slack thread.

8.     April 2025: Due to extremely low adoption, we decided we needed an internal comms campaign to help our people along. Kickoff-to-launch was a mere eight months, and we landed our best campaign yet, aptly named: 

Bold. Urgent. Inspiring.

It mostly featured posters saying as much plastered in the break room. They had a picture of Wilt Chamberlain on them even!

9.     December 2025: Nobody around here does anything in December, but we refuse to give everyone the month off; instead bestowing two solid weeks off for anyone who claims to be overly religious, which turns out to be 100% of our employees somehow. Although the way these people drink and philander they seem more like heathens but whatever.

10.  January 2026: The malaise that sticks around after the holiday break is impenetrable. Why does everyone seem around here seem so sad?

11.  February 2026: Action items re-distributed. Same deal, get the tool, use it, etc. Shut up already.

12.  March 2026: Paula attempts to request a ChatGPT license from IT so she can do the thing the action items told her to do by the deadline the action items gave her.

13.  April 2026: Paula receives the following response from IT:

“All AI license requests should be reviewed by your AI Lead, and then the AI Lead will recommend approval (or not) to your respective executive. Requests are reviewed and assigned weekly. If you’re not sure who your AI Lead is, please reference this table.”

Paula Freaks Out

14. April 2026 (cont’d): Paula freaks out because her entire department, plus several more, are absent from the list. Storms into our luncheon, throws that book, then goes on quite the rant…although she was trying to control her rage SO MUCH this mostly came out threw her nose as she took huge, slow, breathes.

Looking at everything — the Slack posts, the memo, the use case share, the internal ad campaign, the approval chain response — here’s what I see:

Every communication is one layer removed from the actual thing.

The bootcamp talks about AI.

The follow-up Slack talks about the bootcamp.

The use case share talks about how to use AI to process communications about AI.

The approval email talks about the process for requesting the tool you’d use to do the thing the original email asked you to do.

The use case share is literally an example of using AI to process the volume of AI communications being generated by the AI rollout.

And the AI Champions got Slack badges.

None of this was in my work. You changed my work and instead built a small monument to the thing we were trying to prevent and made me look like an idiot. I’m leaving and working at Nordstrom.

Paula Is Nordstrom West Coast Sales Leader

Granted we were mildly offended by Paula’s apparent “rip off the band aid” approach to feedback, but given she literally left and never came back and is now apparently routinely in the Nordstrom President’s Club for Top Sales Achievements, we figure she’d be planning her departure long before we built our Executive Do-AI-Now-Roadmap™, and thus, ultimately, took no offense.

Meanwhile, something might be askew, because as of today the only people who’ve adopted ChatGPT are our cadre of college interns—even the ones from Colgate University—as if it’s no big deal. No handholding, no use cases needed, they just pick it up and go. So perhaps our helicopter-parenting/micromanagement of our Storied Employees’ AI adoption process is itself the killer of innovative behavior.

It’s possible.

Although right now we’re betting the interns’ success is due to their immature, underdeveloped brains, so we’re working on finding more people like them, but in adult form. 

Luckily, we found a Mckinsey consultant who’s top drawer. She submitted a seventeen-slide deck proposing a subcommittee to study why the interns are succeeding. We've approved it. Launch is Q3, pending alignment.

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