Companies are wasting AI on work that shouldn't exist - HR Executive

URL SCAN: Companies are wasting AI on work that shouldn't exist - HR Executive
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The Dissection

The supplied material is a headline plus publisher boilerplate, not the article's substantive argument. The headline frames AI deployment as waste when applied to work that should never have existed. That is a legitimate operational observation, but it confines the problem to workflow hygiene. For an HR audience, the framing makes AI appear manageable: remove pointless tasks, improve productivity, and preserve the employment system.

The real function is to make the first stage of automation sound like managerial housekeeping rather than labor displacement. It notices the debris while avoiding the demolition.

The Core Fallacy

The headline treats unnecessary work as the main target of AI. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, that is only the entry point. Once AI achieves durable cost and performance superiority across cognitive work, competition forces firms to automate work that is economically useful as well as work that is wasteful.

The deeper error is assuming that eliminating pointless work leaves a stable human labor market behind. P1, P2, and P3 imply the opposite: cognitive automation expands, human-only domains cannot be protected at scale, and productive participation collapses. AI is not merely a broom for organizational clutter. It is a replacement engine for the wage-producing labor circuit.

Hidden Assumptions

• Managers can reliably distinguish useless work from work that is merely expensive, slow, or politically protected.
• Firms will deploy AI for organizational improvement rather than whatever use produces the strongest competitive advantage.
• The work that remains after automation will be sufficient to preserve mass employment.
• AI will remain an augmentation tool instead of becoming the superior substitute.
• HR can govern the transition without becoming another layer of administratively replaceable cognitive labor.
• Productivity gains will preserve wages and consumption rather than severing the link between production and employment.

None of these assumptions is established by the supplied material.

Social Function

Primarily: partial truth, ideological anesthetic, and transition management.

The partial truth is that organizations contain ritualized, redundant, and economically useless work. The anesthetic is treating that fact as the whole AI problem. The transition-management function is to give HR leaders a vocabulary for administering automation while postponing the harder conclusion: the institution managing labor may itself lose necessity as labor loses economic centrality.

The Verdict

This is a partial truth wearing a false endpoint. It identifies organizational waste but mistakes the first cut for the final diagnosis. Under DT mechanics, removing work that should not exist is merely the clean-up phase; the terminal phase removes much of the work that currently makes human employment necessary. The headline is therefore not an argument against obsolescence. It is a managerial memo for making obsolescence look like efficiency.