I recently joined Sam Reeve on the People Strategy Forum Powered By CompTeam to talk about my book, An Inbox Between Us, and what I believe is one of the most common mistakes organizations make when adopting AI.
They focus on the version of work that appears in process maps, SOPs, and strategy documents. However, the real work often unfolds somewhere else entirely. In emails. In chats. In meetings. In the small negotiations and adaptations that rarely surface in official documentation.
We explored the questions that most AI strategies overlook, yet heavily influence whether those strategies succeed or fail:
Why do organizations keep automating an imagined version of themselves rather than the one that actually exists?
What do communication patterns, hidden workplace dynamics, and everyday conversations reveal about how decisions really get made?
If AI is designed to mimic human behavior, why are so few organizations taking the time to understand that behavior first?
Sam and I also explored the difference between documented work and actual work, how bottlenecks are rarely just technical inefficiencies but behavioral collisions where different interpretations of a process meet, and why human judgment, accountability, and decision-making do not simply disappear when the task layer gets faster.
Rather than presenting AI as inherently transformative, the conversation examined a subtler reality. AI and automation efforts often fail not because the technology is inadequate, but because they are trained on an imagined organization rather than the one that actually exists. The AI learns the map, not the terrain.
The most valuable AI opportunities often exist in places organizations rarely examine, which is the everyday conversations, the communication patterns, and the human behaviors that quietly drive the work forward.
Everyone is talking about AI. Far fewer are talking about how work actually gets done. Understanding the difference may be the first step toward meaningful change.
Thank you to Sam Reeve for the great conversation.