MAROKO133 Hot ai: ‘AI is tearing companies apart’: Writer AI CEO slams Fortune 500 leaders

📌 MAROKO133 Hot ai: ‘AI is tearing companies apart’: Writer AI CEO slams Fortune 5

May Habib, co-founder and CEO of Writer AI, delivered one of the bluntest assessments of corporate AI failures at the TED AI conference on Tuesday, revealing that nearly half of Fortune 500 executives believe artificial intelligence is actively damaging their organizations — and placing the blame squarely on leadership's shoulders.

The problem, according to Habib, isn't the technology. It's that business leaders are making a category error, treating AI transformation like previous technology rollouts and delegating it to IT departments. This approach, she warned, has led to "billions of dollars spent on AI initiatives that are going nowhere."

"Earlier this year, we did a survey of 800 Fortune 500 C-suite executives," Habib told the audience of Silicon Valley executives and investors. "42% of them said AI is tearing their company apart."

The diagnosis challenges conventional wisdom about how enterprises should approach AI adoption. While most major companies have stood up AI task forces, appointed chief AI officers, or expanded IT budgets, Habib argues these moves reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of what AI represents: not another software tool, but a wholesale reorganization of how work gets done.

"There is something leaders are missing when they compare AI to just another tech tool," Habib said. "This is not like giving accountants calculators or bankers Excel or designers Photoshop."

Why the 'old playbook' of delegating to IT departments is failing companies

Habib, whose company has spent five years building AI systems for Fortune 500 companies and logged two million miles visiting customer sites, said the pattern is consistent: "When generative AI started showing up, we turned to the old playbook. We turned to IT and said, 'Go figure this out.'"

That approach fails, she argued, because AI fundamentally changes the economics and organization of work itself. "For 100 years, enterprises have been built around the idea that execution is expensive and hard," Habib said. "The enterprise built complex org charts, complex processes, all to manage people doing stuff."

AI inverts that model. "Execution is going from scarce and expensive to programmatic, on-demand and abundant," she said. In this new paradigm, the bottleneck shifts from execution capacity to strategic design — a shift that requires business leaders, not IT departments, to drive transformation.

"With AI technology, it can no longer be centralized. It's in every workflow, every business," Habib said. "It is now the most important part of a business leader's job. It cannot be delegated."

The statement represents a direct challenge to how most large organizations have structured their AI initiatives, with centralized centers of excellence, dedicated AI teams, or IT-led implementations that business units are expected to adopt.

A generational power shift is happening based on who understands AI workflow design

Habib framed the shift in dramatic terms: "A generational transfer of power is happening right now. It's not about your age or how long you've been at a company. The generational transfer of power is about the nature of leadership itself."

Traditional leadership, she argued, has been defined by the ability to manage complexity — big teams, big budgets, intricate processes. "The identity of leaders at these companies, people like us, has been tied to old school power structures: control, hierarchy, how big our teams are, how big our budgets are. Our value is measured by the sheer amount of complexity we could manage," Habib said. "Today we reward leaders for this. We promote leaders for this."

AI makes that model obsolete. "When I am able to 10x the output of my team or do things that could never be possible, work is no longer about the 1x," she said. "Leadership is no longer about managing complex human execution."

Instead, Habib outlined three fundamental shifts that define what she calls "AI-first leaders" — executives her company has worked with who have successfully deployed AI agents solving "$100 million plus problems."

The first shift: Taking a machete to enterprise complexity

The new leadership mandate, according to Habib, is "taking a machete to the complexity that has calcified so many organizations." She pointed to the layers of friction that have accumulated in enterprises: "Brilliant ideas dying in memos, the endless cycles of approvals, the death by 1,000 clicks, meetings about meetings — a death, by the way, that's happening in 17 different browser tabs each for software that promises to be a single source of truth."

Rather than accepting this complexity as inevitable, AI-first leaders redesign workflows from first principles. "There are very few legacy systems that can't be replaced in your organization, that won't be replaced," Habib said. "But they're not going to be replaced by another monolithic piece of software. They can only be replaced by a business leader articulating business logic and getting that into an agentic system."

She offered a concrete example: "We have customers where it used to take them seven months to get a creative campaign — not even a product, a campaign. Now they can go from TikTok trend to digital shelf in 30 days. That is radical simplicity."

The catch, she emphasized, is that CIOs can't drive this transformation alone. "Your CIO can't help flatten your org chart. Only a business leader can look at workflows and say, 'This part is necessary genius, this part is bureaucratic scar tissue that has to go.'"

The second shift: Managing the fear as career ladders disappear

When AI handles execution, "your humans are liberated to do what they're amazing at: judgment, strategy, creativity," Habib explained. "The old leadership playbook was about managing headcount. We managed people against revenue: one business development rep for every three account executives, one marketer for every five salespeople."

But this liberation carries profound challenges that leaders must address directly. Habib acknowledged the elephant in the room that many executives avoid discussing: "These changes are still frightening for people, even when it's become unholy to talk about it." She's witnessed the fear firsthand. "It shows up as tears in an AI workshop when someone feels like their old skill set isn't translated to the new."

She introduced a term for a common form of resistance: "productivity anchoring" — when employees "cling to the hard way of doing things because they feel productive, because their self-worth is tied to them, even when empirically AI can be better."

The solution isn't to look away. "We have to design new pathways to impact, to show your people their value is not in executing a task. Their value is in orchestrating systems of execution, to ask the next great question," Habib said. She advocates replacing career "ladders" with "lattices" where "people need…

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🔗 Sumber: venturebeat.com

📌 MAROKO133 Eksklusif ai: Secret Plans Reveal Amazon Plot to Replace 600,000 Worke

Amazon has spent years automating its warehouses with robots. Its mechanical workforce is more than one million strong, rivaling the size of its human workforce of some 1.56 million people. Robots, in fact, are on track to outnumber Amazon employees.

The Jeff Bezos-chaired company claims that the infusion of automation will drive up productivity and efficiency, while creating more high paying jobs. Some workers have praised the robot helpers for alleviating them of repetitive, backbreaking work.

But experts, seeing the writing on the wall, have long warned that Amazon had an ulterior motive with the robots — and now there’s evidence to prove it.

Interviews and leaked documents reveal that the company is planning to replace more than 600,000 jobs with robots, The New York Times reports. By the end, Amazon’s robotics team aims to automate 75 percent of the company’s entire operations. Seemingly, the calculus putting this into action is that it would save 30 cents on each item that it processes and delivers.

Amazon’s reported plans are an alarming wake-up call, as the rise of AI technology has already led to a slew of firings and raised the specter of widespread job destruction, especially among knowledge workers. As the second largest private employer in the US, Amazon has the resources to set a sea-changing precedent that could see manual labor jobs threatened, too.

“Nobody else has the same incentive as Amazon to find the way to automate,” Daron Acemoglu, an MIT professor and automation expert who won last year’s Nobel Prize in economic science, told the NYT. “Once they work out how to do this profitably, it will spread to others, too.”

One of the main ways Amazon plans to achieve this is by slowing hiring to a crawl, even as the company expects to sell twice as many products by 2033, according to the reporting. At some locations like its warehouse in Stone Mountain, it also plans to whittle down its 4,000 employee work force through attrition. By the end, Amazon hopes that some of its fulfillment centers will barely need humans at all.

Amazon’s testing ground for its heavily automated vision is its warehouse in Shreveport, Louisiana, which is swarming with a thousand robots. “Once an item there is in a package,” according to the NYT, a “human barely touches it again.” The warehouse employed roughly 25 percent fewer humans last year than it would have without the robots, documents viewed by the NYT showed.

“With this major milestone now in sight, we are confident in our ability to flatten Amazon’s hiring curve over the next 10 years,” the robotics team wrote in its strategy plan for 2025.

Shreveport’s model will be used at 40 Amazon facilities by the end of 2027, with the Stone Mountain warehouse projected to have its workforce reduced by up to 1,200 employees.

Amazon clearly knows how bad this looks. The leaked documents suggest avoiding terms like “automation” and “AI” when discussing robotics. Its proposed alternative included “advanced technology,” and “cobot,” a portmanteau that’s supposed to suggest collaboration between robots and humans.

It already has plans for damage control in areas where human jobs are on the chopping block, with documents revealing how it weighed up creating an image as a “good corporate citizen” by participating in community events like parades and Toys for Tots.

An Amazon spokesperson told the NYT that the documents didn’t reflect the company’s overall hiring strategy and insisted it was the viewpoint of only one group. The spokesperson also highlighted the company’s plan to hire 250,000 people for the holiday season, but refused to say how many of those jobs would be permanent. In any case, the company expanded its human workforce at an unprecedented rate during the pandemic, which is now triple in size from where it was in 2018, so a hiring spree can’t be taken as a guarantee against downsizing in the future.

Acemoglu, the Nobel prize winning automation expert, warned that if Amazon’s plans go through, “one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator.”

More on robots: Amazon Drones Kamikaze Into Construction Equipment, Burst Into Flames

The post Secret Plans Reveal Amazon Plot to Replace 600,000 Workers With Robot Army appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com