2026.18: Your team already priced in the loss.
Happy Friday friends!
I want to talk about something that has been bothering me. Not what AI does to jobs. What it does to the work.
There is a Todd Henry piece from last week that has been rattling around in my head. The argument is that efficiency culture does not kill craft in one decision. It kills it slowly.
The people on your team who care most about the work walk in with standards. Those standards came from experience, training, the scars of past projects that fell apart. They are real. This is why you hired them. And every time you choose speed over quality, those standards get sacrificed. Quietly. Without a meeting. Review cycles get cut. Proofing gets shortened. Verification gets skipped. Each one a small concession, framed as a reasonable trade-off for the deadline.
After a hundred of those small overrides, the standards no longer belong here. Not because anyone said so out loud. Because the message landed every time the same way. This is not where standards matter.
Apply that to AI, and you get this issue.
Let's break it down.
Signal:
YOUR TEAM HAS ALREADY DONE THE MATH
Resume Now surveyed more than 1,000 employed adults in March about how AI will affect work in 2026. The numbers are not subtle...
63% expect AI to make the workplace feel less human this year.
57% rank skill erosion as the biggest workforce issue, ahead of job displacement at 49%.
42% cite dehumanization of work as a top AI workforce concern.
20% rank loss of creativity and critical thinking as their personal top AI fear.
Read those again.
Your team is not waiting for the leadership offsite to debate AI strategy. They have already done the math. They are watching every time you ship something they know could have been better.
By the time you sit down to discuss culture, they are already grieving.
Scale:
THE MOAT YOU KEEP OVERRIDING
And this is where I see most leadership teams trip up.
The teams I work with are still framing AI as a productivity question. How fast can we ship. How much can we cut. How many hours can we save. That framing was fine in 2023 when access to AI was rare. It is wrong now, because access to AI is not rare anymore. Anyone can buy the tools. Anyone can prompt the model. Whatever speed advantage you got from AI last quarter, your competitor got it this quarter.
So if AI is no longer the moat, what is?
Deloitte’s 2026 Human Capital Trends report has a clean answer: technology is replicable, people are not. Their data says 59% of organizations are taking a tech-focused approach to AI, and those organizations are 1.6x more likely to miss their AI ROI targets compared to organizations taking a human-centric approach. Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index says the same thing in different math. Organizational factors (culture, manager support, talent practices) drive 67% of AI’s reported impact. Individual mindset and behaviour drive 32%. Roughly 2:1 in favour of culture.
A side note worth seeing. MIT’s NANDA project found that 95% of enterprise AI pilots produce no measurable P&L impact. Lead author Aditya Challapally summarized the cause as a learning gap for tools and organizations. Not the model. The team around the model.
The moat is not the AI tool. The moat is the team that uses it well, judges its output well, and shapes the work into something a competitor cannot copy. That is craft. That is taste. That is judgement under uncertainty.
And that is exactly what gets eroded every time you ship “good enough.”
HOW THE MOAT FALLS
Henry’s mechanism is the part of his piece that hit me hardest. The moat does not fall in one decision. It falls in hundreds of small “good enough” overrides. The designer who wanted one more pass. The writer who wanted to rework the framing. The analyst who flagged a number that did not look right.
The first override, they absorb. The second, they adjust. By the 10th, they have stopped bringing their best judgement to the table. They have learned that the answer will always be “we do not have time.”
AI compounds this pattern, because every override is now 10 times cheaper than it used to be. The Copilot-drafted deck is acceptable. The Claude-edited memo is fine. The auto-summarized client report passes the bar. So you ship. And the person on your team who knows it could have been 30% better watches you ship.
Then the next time, they stop flagging it.
Then the time after that, they stop trying.
THREE MOVES TO DEFEND THE MOAT
Henry gives you three moves. Each one needs to go further when AI is in the mix.
1. Name the trade-off, and label the work
Henry says when you choose speed over quality, say so out loud. Acknowledge the cost. “We are shipping this knowing it is not where we would want it. I see the difference, even if we cannot close the gap this time.”
In an AI workflow, take it one step further. Label the mode of work. Microsoft’s Work Trend Index identifies 4 collaboration patterns: Author (you produce, AI helps when called), Editor (you set the intent, AI drafts, you edit), Director (you spec, AI executes), Orchestrator (you design the system, agents run in parallel).
These modes are not the same and your team should know which one applies. A board memo in Director mode is a different beast than the same memo in Author mode. Tell them which is which. Hidden AI is the new “good enough.” When craft people cannot tell where AI ended and a human started, they assume the worst.
2. Designate the human-only zones
Henry says be intentional about where quality is non-negotiable. Which projects get the extra pass. Which deadlines are real and which are negotiable.
In an AI saturated workflow, name the work that stays human. The strategic memo. The first draft of a board narrative. The framing of a client conversation. The voice of an apology email to a customer who was hurt by something your company did.
This is not a productivity sin. It is a craft preservation move. EY’s research describes a practice some of their pharma clients use, called AI Huddles. Weekly sessions where the technical team and the domain experts interpret AI output together. The point is not to debate the model. The point is to keep the human muscle in shape.
3. Ask what part of the work has their fingerprint
Henry’s third move is to ask craft-oriented people what would make them feel proud of the work. In an AI workflow, the question gets sharper.
What part of this work has your fingerprint on it.
If your team writes a proposal where AI drafted the body and a human edited the framing, the framing is the fingerprint. Make that visible. Talk about it. Credit it. If the only part a human did is hit “send,” they have nothing to point to and they will stop showing up. Pride is portable. People take their best work to where it is recognized.
WHAT YOU ARE ACTUALLY PROTECTING
The Gerlich study (n=666) and a recent Frontiers in Medicine paper on AI deskilling confirm what your craft people already feel. When humans repeatedly offload cognitive work to AI, the prefrontal cortex becomes less active. Independent reasoning capacity drops. Researchers now use the term “AI-induced cognitive atrophy.”
Translation: every override that lets “good enough” win is not just a one-time loss of quality. It is a one-time training rep that your team did not get. Skip enough reps and the muscle atrophies. The capacity to think, judge, and shape the work weakens. And the moat is gone.
The Resume Now data from the top of today’s rant is your team’s early warning system. 20% of workers are already worried about losing their creativity and critical thinking. They know what is at stake. They are watching to see if you do.
Deep Dive:
No deep dive this week. Instead, one question I would put on your next leadership agenda.
In the last 30 days, what did we ship as "good enough" that someone on the team flagged as below standard? What signal did we send when we shipped it?
The leaders who can answer this are doing the harder work. The leaders who cannot are watching their moat erode in real time.
That is your moat. Defend it.
Thanks for reading!
I am the PA announcer for the University of Calgary Dinos. McMahon Stadium has no autocorrect. Reminds me every game why some work has to stay yours.
It is kinda funny, this week's piece spent more time being rewritten than written. Apparently 'good enough' is harder to ship when you wrote about it.
The irony is not lost.
See you next Friday.
Best,
JT
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