Nicholas Cocks

My company rolled out AI tools 11 months ago. Since then, every task I do takes longer. I am not allowed to say this out loud. Not because there is a policy. There is no policy. There is something worse than a policy. There is enthusiasm. There is a Slack channel called #ai-wins where people post screenshots of AI outputs with captions like "this just saved me an hour." There is a VP who opens every all-hands with "the companies that adopt fastest win." There is a Director who renamed his team from Operations to Intelligent Operations. There is a peer review question that now asks: "How have you leveraged AI tools to enhance your workflow this quarter?" If the answer is "I haven't, because I was faster before," that is a career decision. So I leverage. Emails. Before the tools, I wrote emails. This took the amount of time it takes to write an email. I did not measure it. Nobody measured it. The email got written and sent and it was fine. Now I write the email. Then I highlight the text and click "Enhance with AI." The AI rewrites my email. It replaces "Can we meet Thursday?" with "I'd love to explore the possibility of finding a mutually convenient time to align on this." I read the rewrite. I delete the rewrite. I send my original email. This takes 4 minutes instead of 2. The 2 extra minutes are the enhancement. I do this 11 times a day. That is 22 minutes I spend each day rejecting improvements to sentences that were already finished. In #ai-wins I posted a screenshot of the rewrite. I did not post the part where I deleted it. 23 people reacted with the rocket emoji. That is adoption. Meetings. We have an AI notetaker in every meeting now. It joins automatically. It records. It transcribes. It summarizes. After each meeting I receive a 3-paragraph summary of the meeting I just attended. I read the summary. This takes 3 minutes. I was in the meeting. I know what happened. I am reading a machine's account of something I experienced firsthand. Sometimes the account is wrong. Last Tuesday it attributed a comment about Q3 revenue to me. My manager made that comment. I spent 4 minutes correcting the transcript. Before the notetaker, I did not spend 7 minutes after each meeting correcting a robot's memory of something I personally witnessed. I attend 11 meetings a week. That is 77 minutes per week supervising a transcription nobody requested. I mentioned this once. My manager said "think about the people who weren't in the meeting." The people who weren't in the meeting do not read the summaries. I checked. The read receipts show single-digit opens. The summaries exist not because they are useful but because they are there. I read them for the same reason. Documents. I write a weekly status update. Before the tools, this took 10 minutes. I typed what happened. I sent it. My manager skimmed it. The system worked. Now I open the AI writing assistant. I give it my bullet points. It produces a draft. The draft says "Significant progress was achieved across multiple workstreams." I did not achieve significant progress across multiple workstreams. I updated a spreadsheet and sent 4 emails. I rewrite the draft to say what actually happened. Then I run my rewrite through the grammar tool. It suggests I change "done" to "completed" and "next week" to "in the forthcoming period." I click Ignore 9 times. Then I send the version I would have written in 10 minutes. The process now takes 30. I have been doing this every week for 11 months. I have added 20 minutes to a task that did not need 20 more minutes. I call this efficiency. I have been calling it efficiency for 11 months. That is what efficiency means now. It means the additional time you spend to arrive at the same outcome through a longer process. Nobody has questioned this definition. I have not offered it for review. I kept a log once. 2 weeks. Every task, timed. Before-AI and after-AI. The after number was larger in every case. Every single one. Not by a little. The range was 40 to 200 percent. I deleted the log. I deleted it because it was a document that said, in plain numbers, that the AI tools make me slower. And a document like that has no place in a company where AI adoption is a strategic priority. I could not send it to my manager. He championed the rollout. I could not post it in #ai-wins. I could not raise it in a meeting because the notetaker would transcribe it and the summary would read "[Name] expressed concerns about AI tool efficacy" and that summary would be the first one anyone actually reads. So I do what everyone does. I use the tools. I spend the extra time. I post in #ai-wins. I write "leveraged AI to streamline weekly reporting" in my review and my manager gives me a 4 out of 5 for innovation. I have innovated nothing. I have added steps to processes that were already finished. I have made simple things longer and labeled the difference with words that used to mean something. Every week in #ai-wins someone posts a screenshot. And 20 people react with the rocket emoji. And nobody posts the part where they deleted the output and did the task themselves. Nobody posts the revert. Nobody posts the before-and-after timer. Nobody will. Because "I was better at my job before the AI tools" is a sentence that cannot be said out loud in any company that has decided AI is the future. Every company has decided AI is the future. So we leverage. Quietly. Adding steps. Calling them optimization. Getting slightly less done, slightly more slowly, with slightly more steps, and reporting it as progress. My yearly review is next month. There is a new section this year. "AI Impact Assessment." It asks me to quantify the hours saved by AI tools per week. I will write a number. The number will be positive. It will not be true. But the AI writing assistant will help me phrase it convincingly. That is the one thing it does well.