Last week at the Build a Better Agency Summit, I took part in a roundtable discussion with a group of agency owners, discussing AI adoption at their companies.
At one point, the moderator asked us to look into the near future and share one way we expected to benefit from AI. People talked about doing work more efficiently, better managing projects, having better data at their fingertips, etc.
All very reasonable things, but what stood out to me was that they were looking at AI only as a productivity tool that will allow them and their teams to do all the work they’re doing today, just faster and more efficiently – not a revolutionary technology that can fundamentally change how they work and what they do.
This is not a knock on the people at the roundtable. In fact, they represent the leading edge of where agencies are in AI adoption today; they’re using it in meaningful, connected ways and having a positive impact on their businesses.
But their responses underscored something I hear in just about every conversation about AI: almost no one is thinking about AI as a way to do less work. One of the agency owners came closest to this when she said she’d love to use AI to get down to just a 40-hour work week.
Here’s the irony of AI adoption in 2026: The people using it the most are burning out the fastest.
The lesson? AI adoption isn't neutral. Done wrong, it actively makes people worse off.
Part of this is the natural outcome of adopting any new technology. But part of it reflects a choice — one most people are making without realizing it. AI created new capacity, and the instinct is to fill it. That instinct is costing people. The machine isn't making them more human. It's making them faster machines.
While business leaders are optimizing workflows, the Pope just wrote a 240-page encyclical about AI’s role in society. Anthropic and OpenAI are sitting down with Hindu and Sikh leaders to seek moral guidance as they develop their technologies. A Buddhist temple in Seoul ordained a robot monk and asked AI to write its rules. These are more than quirky stories. They're signs that the conversation about AI has escaped the tech sector and entered some of the most fundamental conversations humans have: what is the role of technology in society, what is a good life, and what is work actually for?
Pope Leo believes AI will damage human purpose and dignity if we just use it to replace workers. The Jogye Order in South Korea is hoping the robot monk will introduce more young people to Buddhist teachings. Anthropic and OpenAI led the inaugural “Faith-AI Covenant” roundtable in New York to discuss how best to infuse morality and ethics into the fast-developing technology.
We didn’t have conversations like this about bitcoin.
Discussing the Pope’s encyclical this week on CNBC, Harvard theologian Arthur Brooks summed up the tension well:
"When you let [AI] do the analytical stuff, freeing you up to go love people in person…then it can make you more human," he said. "But if you’re using it for the girlfriend experience, or for a buddy, or, God forbid, your therapist, then you’re outsourcing human relationships to AI, and you will become the machine."
Brooks was talking about personal relationships, but the same logic applies to our work. AI can free us to do the things that only humans can do — the creative leaps, the strategic bets, the conversations that build real trust and relationships. Or we can use it to clear our plates so we can fill them right back up again.
Most of us are choosing the latter. Without really choosing at all. We’ve been given the parts to build a rocket shop, but are using it to make a Honda Accord.
The question I keep asking myself is, Where would I go if I had a rocket ship?