Why we are Powerpointing ourselves into oblivion instead of designing a humane future of work?

et tu, PowerPoint?

I sit staring at the empty slide template, blinking slowly, in hopes that the words will start to fill themselves in. It’s not so much that I’m unclear on what it is I want to communicate. Rather it’s that I have no idea whether anyone will take the time or attention to receive it. If a slide is presented in a meeting with no decision-makers, does it make a sound?

Since the updates aren’t relevant to me, and I won’t be called upon to make any pressing decisions, I half daze while I type in a few prompts to get ahead on the prep for the second and third meetings.

At first, the lightning speed with which I could prepare summaries, dispense with emails, and even prepare these devilish Powerpoint slides empowered me with a giddy glee.

But I quickly learned that each successful deliverable would just beget more requests. My newfound efficiency just made me a target of newer and more relentless asks. And as my colleagues grew in their own AI power, I would start to be the recipient of the AI Workslop as well.

Poor habits, increasing in quantity

There are only so many productive hours of the day and unfortunately, my precious fully-caffeinated hours have been squandered. I’ve attended status meetings consisting of a slow shuffle of participants, each presenting for 8 or so minutes about what they’ve done this week. Generally, no decisions are made or discussed. It’s more of a rotation of powerless peers preening for each other, to be followed by a cheerful, “I’ll let you have three minutes back!” to close the ceremony.

What is AI Workslop?

Half-Baked Slides, Professional Emails, More Pointless Meetings, Teams and WebEx Channels, Cursor Dashboards, Horribly Abbreviated Notes, AI-Generated Images

Workslop doesn’t have to be AI – it’s defined as hastily-created work product that hasn’t been thoughtfully assembled or thought through. But AI certainly makes it easier to produce.

With each subsequent set of slides, meeting summary and required update meeting, my soul disobediently leaves my body and I remain at my desk, simply a husk of the eager and youthful upstart I used to be.

The problem is not the tools, it is leadership that confuses activity with strategy and aesthetics with impact.

From Craft to Slop: What We Lost

Slower tools like putting pen to paper, the hand-delivered memo, and even having to pick up the actual phone. These things required some level of handicraft to assemble, time to put together, and time to reach its destination.

Learning by sitting at someone’s desk and looking over their shoulder required that you form your first work relationship quite quickly, and that you literally observed the process from beginning to end.

We had meetings that had a single purpose, workshops to put our heads together and figure things out (while drawing on an actual white board or sticky notes), and those meetings would often have, like, lunch, or some little candy bars in the center of the table!

Today we have become bombarded with chats from all sides, synchronous production of slides and docs, plus a new inundation of AI summaries and dashboards and friendly chatbots. I can now even unload all of my work insecurities and frustrations directly upon my AI career coach, who gently talks me out of berating everyone.

We’ve traded our attention, coherence and meaning for speed, volume, and “visibility.”

Just ask LinkedIn, everyone’s favorite home for AI slop and completely unrelatable career advice.

How Leadership Creates AI Workslop

Lack of Strategy

When we forget that the work we do every single day should be in service of solving a specific problem or meeting a specific customer need, then workslop is bound to be the result. Before ChatGPT was the x for an algorithm’s y, humans put mouse to textbox to slop together some inane slides so that people could debate in a room whether this month was as productive as last.

Our meetings should be crisply fixated on the defined problem, the success metric, or the group’s coherence. Without a shared goal, the outputs are simply performative.

Poor Communication

Perhaps the goals and the strategy are well in hand. Your department has their marching orders, those other teams have their own, but no leader has managed to figure out how it all meets in the middle. The lack of clarity around the conflicting directives and the unspoken political situation give us the same outcome as having no strategy at all!

Broken Incentives

Without clear goals, strategy, communication and accountability, where do our little doers end up? There are no alternatives for them BUT to create a deck proving what they did this month. How could they otherwise get credit for existing?

The skills required for the future of work go far beyond performative AI Workslop and require that our best employees apply the tools at hand to solve complex problems and redefine workflows. Let’s let them.

The Future of Work is a Design Problem, Not A Tools Problem

From the lens of the futurist, let’s look at some options for how this could go:

A world of auto-generated everything, where deliverables aren’t trusted and humans are exhausted.

• Notification fatigue, which started pre-COVID, hit a real peak and then became a full time friction
• Workers are deluged with AI-generated outputs, dashboards, measures, emails, and posts
• Algorithmic tracking of employees, customers, users and “productivity”
• People now starting to use AI as a replacement for Google and a replacement for critical thinking

A world where AI supports shared understanding, decisions, and rest instead of clutter.

• Workflow designed around what humans and AI respectively do best – Adaptive enablement and shared context designed to minimize friction and performative outputs
• Co-creation with colleagues and AI assistants (digital employees) together collectively in real-time, with instant access to deep company intelligence
• Clarity in communication and goals leading to efficient problem-solving

What Responsible AI Leadership Looks Like

As we enter the era beyond Tokenmaxxing (just ask Uber), the teams paying the AI token costs realize that not everything should be prompted. So it’s not just “AI everything”, it’s defining and clarifying what roles our digital employees are best suited for, and leaving our human employees to excel in their truly human tasks.

China has been the first to legislate the definition of AI Agentic roles and responsibilities. Should we follow suit, for the benefit of clarity? What decisions are AI Agents allowed to make vs humans? And who takes responsibility for their oversight?

This requires

• Clarity: What problems should AI touch or not touch, and why?
• Constraint: Intentionally limiting our number of artifacts and deliverables, our performative theater.
• Care: Recognize that every “quick deck” or un-reviewed summary costs someone else time, trust, and cognitive energy.

What this looks like

• Standard SOPs for deck templates and expectations to reduce effort and churn of tokens and human brainpower.
• Conversation-first meetings vs decks for the sake of decks.
• Origin notes or stamps. Which of this output was AI-generated and which parts were created and reviewed by a human?

What Type Of Leaders Are You Creating?

Leaders, it’s time to stop auditioning your performers with a decade-old playbook.

The playbook for future leaders requires they think bigger, collaborate to solve problems, and manage digital employees (their team of AI agents) and completely new workflows. They will be co-creating the new workplace with AI, and creating and sharing reusable context, tools, and methodologies across the organization that will empower each other.

They can’t do any of that if they are battling each other, creating AI Workslop, and failing to achieve visibility in your old leadership paradigm. And they can’t do it “on the side,” taking on all the mental load and emotional labor that the organization has kicked down the road.

Set Your AI Strategy. Communicate it Clearly. Stick with a Program Long Enough to See Outcomes. Establish and Be Worthy of Trust. Value Depth Over Volume.

Building Futures That Work

You do not stop AI workslop by blocking tools or banning decks.

You stop it by choosing the kind of workplace you are willing to build every single day. Every request, every meeting, every “quick deck” rehearses one of two futures.

In one, people scramble to feed dashboards, polish slides, and keep up with a blur of auto-generated noise.

In the other, people are trusted to think, experiment, and use AI in service of real problems, shared context, and humane pace.

It is a leadership decision about what you reward, what you ignore, and what you refuse to normalize.

If you lead a team or host meetings, begin small and specific:
• Name where AI should help and where it should not.
• Retire one performative ritual that no longer serves a clear purpose.
• Replace one “deck for the sake of a deck” with a live conversation and a documented decision.

If you shape strategy, go further:
• Design workflows that protect human attention as a finite resource.
• Treat AI agents as digital employees who need roles, guardrails, and supervisors, not as a magic wand.
• Build feedback loops so your people can tell you where workslop is piling up and what it is costing them.

There is no neutral stance here.

Either you are designing toward a future where AI amplifies meaning and shared understanding, or you are drifting toward a future where no one quite believes the work in front of them. The future of work is being authored in the mundane choices you make about meetings, metrics, and tools.

If you want a future where work feels worth doing, where technology serves people instead of hollowing them out, you have to lead for it now.