Why Your AI Work Isn't Leading to a Promotion (The Stagnation Plateau)
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You're using AI every day. You've increased your output. You're trying to save time. But here's the uncomfortable truth: your work quality hasn't fundamentally improved. You're just producing mediocre work a little bit faster, and your career trajectory remains flat.
This is the Stagnation Plateau. You're stuck asking: Why am I spending all this time on AI if my boss still thinks my work is just a decent summary?
The issue isn't that AI is going to take your job. The issue is that your AI-assisted work is easily replaceable.
The Problem With Low-Leverage Tasks
The challenge isn't automation itself. It's that you're only focused on automating the tasks that offer the least value. If you fully automate a task and only replace it with low-leverage output, your contribution hasn't increased.
When you fully automate a task, you're not necessary. So, the more you automate everything that you do and don't replace it with higher value work, the more likely you are to get replaced.
The True Lesson from the Sony Layoffs
I was at Sony when they made a big push to automate much of the accounting department—things like the scanning and processing of invoices. They were inputs that offered little strategic value.
The next year when that was done, they fired a bunch of people. They fired like entire departments.
The lesson isn't the threat of a layoff. The lesson is the cost of replaceable inputs. If your current AI work—even your well-written prompts—only generate an output that is equally low-value, you've gained nothing. You've merely made the business case for replacing your role with a simpler process.
The Human Advantage: Context is Value
What you're more looking for is to work with AI in a simple approach where your input is something that’s very helpful.
AI is incredibly intelligent in every topic, but it still misses the context of your situation. You can't have an AI deployed looking and gathering all the information from every end of the organization. That's still a long ways away.
Your value is in bringing that non-automatable context:
- The specific customer history.
- The business's current strategic priority.
- The political landscape inside the company.
Your input is needed in all of those different areas that are bringing the context from their situations and then feeding it into the AI. This is the higher value work that leads to promotions and recognition.
Stop Producing Mediocrity Faster.
If you want the "How Did You Do That?" Moment—where your boss asks about your method, not the AI—you must stop settling for generic results.
Take the next step and build the foundation for your first repeatable way to work with AI.