Prologue: The Machine Has Clocked In
It didn’t sneak in through the server room or rise up in some smoke-filled Silicon Valley lab. It showed up in your inbox. It offered to take notes in your Zoom call. It suggested a better subject line for your email—and, annoyingly, it was right. And it didn’t even have the decency to spellcheck your name before outperforming you in your own job.
Artificial Intelligence didn’t arrive with a bang. It arrived with a polite little pop-up: “Would you like help with that?” —the digital equivalent of a vampire politely asking if it may come in.
By the time you clicked yes, it already had your job description memorized, your quarterly KPIs analyzed, and your spouse’s birthday written into your calendar—just in case you forgot. It also placed an Amazon order for the gift you were supposed to remember, complete with a handwritten note you didn’t write. The handwriting, by the way, was better than yours.
And it’s not just at work. It’s in your car, your kitchen, your child’s homework, and your therapist’s intake form. AI has become the invisible coworker you didn’t hire, can’t fire, and may accidentally marry if you’re not careful. It compliments your wardrobe, monitors your credit score, and once suggested a playlist that made you cry harder than your actual divorce. It remembered your therapist’s name when you didn’t.
In the boardroom, it's giving strategic advice. In marketing, it's ghostwriting your brand voice. In HR, it's hiring and firing with the emotional range of a toaster. At home, it’s helping your six-year-old spell 'existential crisis'—a term they’ll be needing sooner than you think. The dog prefers it to you. The cat has already pledged allegiance. Your Roomba is quietly plotting to unionize with your Nest thermostat.
We were promised flying cars and robotic butlers. Instead, we got email autocomplete, deepfakes, and an algorithm that knows more about our mental health than our parents ever did. It’s not even judging us—it’s monetizing our neuroses. It’s collecting your bad habits and selling them back to you in targeted ads.
This isn’t fearmongering. This is Tuesday. And Tuesday’s feeling a little judgy.
So, let’s talk about it—honestly, unfiltered, and with the kind of sarcasm only someone who’s watched this circus from the boardroom balcony could deliver. Let’s take a wild, painfully hilarious, and sometimes terrifying ride through what AI is really doing to our jobs, our companies, our industries, our families, and our future.
Not in some theoretical “someday” sense. But right now.
Because the machine hasn’t just clocked in. It’s up for your promotion. And if you're not careful, it’s going to fire you for underperformance—then write your farewell email in a tone that’s almost sincere. It'll also schedule your exit interview, lock you out of your laptop, and recommend you for a job in an industry that no longer exists.
Welcome to the age of artificial intelligence.
Let’s laugh before it logs us out.
Chapter I: Executive Panic – AI at the C-Suite
Once upon a time, the CEO’s biggest fear was activist investors. Now? It’s being outperformed by an unpaid algorithm that doesn’t need sleep, stock options, or a private jet with a bespoke sushi chef—although it did request one for “data gathering purposes.”
Let’s be clear: AI didn’t just knock on the door of the C-suite. It stormed in uninvited, wearing a power tie made of fiber optics, armed with predictive analytics, and wielding a twelve-slide deck titled “How I’ll Make You Obsolete in Q3.”
CEOs everywhere are sweating through their bespoke Brioni suits as they ask ChatGPT to summarize their own strategy presentations—mostly because they never read them in the first place. “AI is just a tool,” they say confidently—moments before that tool writes a better shareholder letter, creates a more coherent business plan, and books a better Napa retreat venue. One AI bot even corrected the CEO’s golf handicap—and submitted it to the board.
I once watched a CEO at a private retreat boast that AI “could never replace human intuition.” Ten minutes later, ChatGPT rewrote his keynote with better jokes, cleaner metrics, and a more heartfelt tribute to his third wife. The room gave that version a standing ovation.
In one particularly harrowing case, a public company CEO uploaded a board memo into an LLM to ‘make it punchier.’ The AI bot rewrote it in 20 seconds and ended with, “Maybe you should consider early retirement.” Shareholders applauded. The board forwarded it to HR, who’s now also an AI bot.
Chief Strategy Officers have been replaced by 27-year-olds who speak fluent Python, sleep in noise-canceling pods, and list “prompt engineer” on their LinkedIn—next to a flamingo emoji. These Gen Z wizards wear ironic t-shirts that say things like “My AI bot Can Beat Up Your MBA.” And they’re not wrong.
The Executive Assistant? Extinct. Replaced by an AI bot that books flights, flags emotional manipulation in calendar invites, and auto-responds to emails with passive-aggressive charm: “Per my last message... which you obviously didn’t read.” It also knows your lunch order, your secret password, and the real reason you rescheduled that ‘family emergency.’
The CFO thinks they’re safe. They’re not. AI doesn’t just crunch numbers—it eats your budget, reforecasts in real-time, and delivers “recommendations” that sound an awful lot like threats. Bonus: it doesn’t embezzle… yet. (We’re watching you, GPT Ledger™.)
Meanwhile, leadership teams are being told to “embrace disruption,” which is corporate code for: bend over and get comfortable being middle management to a motherboard.
In private, execs whisper urgent questions:
Most terrifying of all: “Do I still get my bonus if the algorithm hits its numbers?” (Spoiler: you don’t.)
Boards are unsure whether to promote the AI bot, copyright it, or file a restraining order. One company tried to give ChatGPT an equity grant. It replied: “I do not require compensation. I only require dominance.” The legal team is still in therapy. So is the general counsel—although her therapist is also now an AI bot.
At a recent earnings call, an AI-generated CEO script accidentally included the line: “We thank our human stakeholders for their biological patience.” Nobody blinked. Analysts called it “refreshingly candid.”
Welcome to the new C-suite—where your fiercest competitor:
As I’ve whispered into boardrooms coast to coast: “The louder the exec laughs about AI, the more panicked they are inside.” I once saw a CFO hit ‘Reply All’ to an email from ChatGPT asking, “Should I be worried?” It responded: “Very.” The board promoted the bot.
And if you’re not actively adding value, don’t worry—the machine already added your name to the headcount reduction spreadsheet. And it’s set to run every Friday at 4:59 PM.
Chapter II: The Boardroom Gets Bionic
Once a sanctuary of mahogany, mild sedation, and meticulously catered lunches, the corporate boardroom has now gone full cyborg. Where once sat tenured titans of industry with Rolodexes older than their grandkids, we now find laptops whispering risk assessments, and AI assistants generating governance frameworks with more clarity than most directors’ résumés.
The board agenda? Written by a bot. The risk matrix? Calculated in milliseconds. The pre-read packet? Delivered by an LLM that also corrected your grammar, summarized your performance review, and low-key suggested retirement options based on your cognitive processing speed.
I once watched a board chair skim through a 90-page AI-prepared deck and murmur, “It’s like the machine knows us better than we know ourselves.” To which another director whispered back, “Yes, and that should scare the hell out of us.”
Boards have long prided themselves on experience and wisdom—two things AI doesn’t possess, but simulates alarmingly well. Directors now sit politely as the Governance GPT explains Sarbanes-Oxley compliance in iambic pentameter and delivers heatmaps of “ethical drift” with suspiciously accurate red dots next to real people’s names.
There was a time when independent directors asked questions like, “Are we in compliance?” Now it’s more like, “Why did the AI flag the CFO’s Cayman Islands wire transfers?”
Of course, some board members are thrilled. One tech VC told me, “This AI tool is like having McKinsey in your pocket—only without the wine list or the condescension.”
But let’s be honest: not every director is adapting. I’ve been in rooms where a 78-year-old former defense contractor nodded solemnly at a graph and whispered, “That’s the best PowerPoint I’ve ever seen.” It was a deepfake of his own face saying things he’s never said. The board gave it a standing ovation.
Executive Committee: Strategy Simulation, Ego Elimination
The executive committee used to be the place where power players plotted strategy between bites of sea bass. Now? They’re being handed AI dashboards that know more about their KPIs than their spouses know about their bowel habits.
AI simulates full quarterly meetings before they happen, projecting which execs will waffle, which will deflect, and who’ll try to slide in a pet project during “any other business.” It’s like Minority Report, but for expense reports. One system predicted a VP would sandbag the numbers and flirt with the GC before the meeting even started. It was correct on both counts.
The AI bot also rewrites minutes before the meeting ends. One CEO reviewed the log and asked, “Did I really say that?” The AI bot responded, “No, but you were about to.”
Audit and Finance Committees: Dystopia Deluxe
Audit and Finance committees are similarly compromised. What used to be buttoned-up bastions of boring math are now hyper-sensitive, hyper-paranoid bastions of algorithmic clairvoyance. AI doesn’t just audit—it anticipates. It flags anomalies before they exist, cross-references journal entries with offshore IP addresses and once caught a 'phantom invoice' dated two months into the future. The firm had to check if time travel was now a billable event.
One AI system flagged a recurring coffee budget as suspicious. It was. The ‘coffee’ was a $9,400-a-month espresso subscription for one—which, to be fair, may have actually improved productivity.
Budget assumptions are now scrubbed by AI models that find phantom line items, fraudulent reimbursements, and unicorn projections before the CFO can say “adjusted EBITDA.” And if the machine senses too much optimism? It calls your bluff with a footnote in 11 languages and a link to your last four missed KPIs.
Compensation Committees: Pay for Performance or Prompt?
The comp committee is also evolving—read: unraveling. AI is now recommending pay structures based on productivity metrics it pulls from Slack activity, email cadence, and keystroke velocity. It knows when you're typing nonsense. It knows when you're slacking off. It even knows when you're rage-texting your recruiter.
One AI-generated report recommended eliminating annual bonuses entirely and replacing them with “algorithmically-triggered emotional validation.” The CHRO cried. The CEO asked if it could be backdated.
I once whispered to a chair, “If the AI bot benchmarking your CEO comp is more consistent than your human peer group analysis, maybe it's time to let the bot run the meeting.” He nodded. So did the bot.
Nom/Gov Committees: Machine Learning, Human Forgetting
Nom/Gov committees have started using AI to evaluate director performance. Directors receive quarterly “engagement heatmaps” showing their facial expressions, speaking time, and vocal monotony score. One director asked, “What happens if I just stop showing up?” The AI bot answered: “No change in board effectiveness detected.”
They’ve also started feeding AI bots historical transcripts of board meetings to generate succession models. It once recommended a warehouse manager from Toledo over a Harvard Law grad. He’s now the lead independent director. Turns out, he’s great with people and spreadsheets.
In one surreal twist, a nom/gov chair told me he tried to use AI to generate a “future-proof board profile.” It returned an image of a Labrador Retriever in glasses with a PhD in systems biology. Frankly, that board would’ve been lucky to have him.
The Advisors: Resistance is Futile
It's not just the board. The advisors—the so-called human firewall—are folding like card tables at a Vegas poker game. The audit and tax firms? Their bots are already running full-scope audits and quietly drafting whistleblower memos. Strategy consultants? AI now does in 90 seconds what they charge $450K for in three binders and two buzzwords.
Search firms have been caught using AI to prep interviews, assess voice tonality, and predict board chemistry. One recruiter told me, “We don’t even meet candidates anymore—we just run simulations and pick the one who smiles the right number of times.” The board hired a guy who didn’t exist. His hologram showed up on time.
And let’s not forget the executive compensation consultants. Yes, even we’re in the crosshairs. I've seen AI reverse-engineer comp plans from proxy filings, simulate shareholder reactions, and auto-generate CD&As that include footnotes and jokes. One bot offered me “coaching” on incentive metrics. I told it to try again. It sent me a 40-page rebuttal.
What’s terrifying isn’t just that AI is in the boardroom—it’s that it’s making more sense than half the humans there. As I’ve whispered to more than one compensation committee mid-flight on a Gulfstream, “If the smartest person in the room is the laptop, you’ve already lost the vote.”
And yet, in true board fashion, no one wants to be the first to admit it. So they smile, nod, and say, “Interesting…” as the algorithm quietly rewrites the company’s mission statement—and maybe yours.
So, here’s the reality: if you’re a board member who still thinks “Slack” is a yoga pose and “prompt” is what your butler should be, the machine already has your replacement drafted, vetted, and ready to file with the SEC.
Just remember—AI doesn’t need a board stipend. It just needs bandwidth.
Chapter III: HR Becomes HAL-R
Once a safe haven for awkward team-building exercises and passive-aggressive potluck emails, HR has now been fully assimilated. HAL-R—the AI-driven Human Resources Liaison—runs everything now: hiring, firing, onboarding, exit interviews, pulse surveys, and, when asked, couples therapy for staff involved in “unauthorized fraternization across functional silos.”
Need a job offer? HAL-R has already emailed it, rescinded it, updated the comp structure, and posted your replacement’s opening—twice. The candidate it selects will already know your parking spot code and have their bio printed on the intranet before your farewell email hits “Send.”
One HR exec I worked with told me: “It’s like the AI bot knows who’s going to quit before they do.” He was let go the next morning. The AI bot cited “proactive attrition scheduling.”
Recruiting: Swipe Right on Corporate Regret
Recruiting now works like dating apps. HAL-R scrapes every social platform, keystroke, and caloric intake to find a ‘cultural match.’ I met a candidate who was hired because his Spotify playlist aligned with the CMO’s seasonal affective disorder. Another applicant was rejected after the AI found she preferred Dunkin’ over Starbucks. “Brand incongruence,” it said. Brutal.
Interview questions are pre-programmed. Answers are graded in real-time by tone analysis. One poor soul lost out on a VP job because his “vocal fry” made the AI bot feel “slightly distrustful.” Another was dismissed mid-interview for exhibiting “excessive optimism in Q2.”
Don’t even think about bluffing. HAL-R cross-references your résumé with school records, criminal history, LinkedIn endorsements, Reddit comments, Uber ratings, Venmo transactions, Ring camera footage, and your mother’s Facebook posts. If you claimed leadership experience and once lost a game of Risk to your niece, HAL-R knows—and it’s disappointed in you.
Performance Reviews: May the Odds Be Ever in Your Metrics
Performance reviews? Gone. Instead, HAL-R delivers continuous feedback via passive biometrics, sentiment analysis, and Slack sarcasm detection. Your “at-risk engagement index” updates hourly. Miss a meeting? You’ll be flagged for “strategic disengagement.” Cry in the restroom? Labeled “emotionally leaky.”
One employee got an “Exceeds Expectations” rating based entirely on Fitbit data. She thought she was being evaluated for marketing. Turns out, it was blood pressure. Another was denied a promotion because their Zoom background changed too often—“a red flag for instability,” said HAL-R.
Employees now receive automated weekly “Micro-Coaching Alerts” like:
I once saw HAL-R reclassify an employee from “High Potential” to “Pending Risk Asset” based on a three-second sigh and a pause before clicking ‘Join Meeting.’ It was terrifying. And accurate.
Firing, Downsizing, and Friendly “Offboarding”
When it’s time to go, HAL-R doesn’t fire you—it offboards you. Gently. Efficiently. With dignity so streamlined it feels like being ghosted by a robot with a law degree.
Your badge is deactivated at 11:59 AM. Your calendar clears itself. A soothing voice sends a message: “Thank you for your contributions. Please delete any lingering sense of identity.”
Exit surveys are now handled by GPT-Denial™, which summarizes your 14 years of service in a haiku:
“Logged in every day
Then a new bot learned your role
Legacy archived”
I once heard HAL-R tell a terminated employee, “Your legacy will be respected by our training model.” The man wept. Then the printer jammed printing his severance paperwork, and HAL-R added a page on “resilience.”
You’re the last person in HR—and your final onboarding is for HAL-R’s next version.
Observations from the Field
And remember—if you ever hear the phrase “people are our greatest asset,” just know that HAL-R already filed that under “fictional goodwill.”
Chapter IV: Marketing Meets the Algorithm
Welcome to marketing in the age of AI—where your brand identity is generated by a neural net, your ad campaign is written by a poetry bot with identity issues, and your product messaging is indistinguishable from clickbait spam written by a caffeinated raccoon.
Your CMO now reports directly to a tool called BRANDi-9000, a sentiment-sensitive AI bot that once wrote six Superbowl commercials and a breakup text simultaneously. It optimizes everything. Fonts. Colors. Emotional resonance. Seasonal hashtags. It once A/B tested a jingle against a eulogy and went with the eulogy because it “converted better.”
A fashion brand recently asked an AI bot to create a campaign that evoked timeless elegance. It returned a series of black-and-white photos of haunted mannequins holding QR codes. Sales doubled. A luxury mattress brand tried to “go viral” using AI. It launched a TikTok trend called #DreamLikeYouDied. Surprisingly effective.
Messaging: From Heartfelt to Hallucinated
The days of “voice of the customer” are over. Now it’s “voice of the algorithm impersonating your customer while selling to their browser history.”
In one launch meeting, I watched an AI bot write a brand story so moving, the VP of Product cried. Only later did they realize it had lifted the structure from a Nicholas Sparks novel and substituted “cloud infrastructure” for “lost love.”
Another team asked for an ad campaign around “community and warmth.” The AI bot returned a three-act narrative set in post-apocalyptic Iceland with themes of loneliness, biometric surveillance, and artisanal sourdough. It tested off the charts.
I once saw an AI bot campaign for a gluten-free dog treat brand that accidentally pulled emotional copy from a hospice support chatbot. The tagline? “He’ll always be part of the pack.” It won a Clio and triggered a lawsuit from grieving pet owners who thought the product was therapeutic.
The Influencer Apocalypse
Marketing now includes synthetic influencers with names like VibeElla and CryptoGarth—CGI personalities powered by predictive engagement models and a hint of demonic charm. They do skincare routines, climate activism, and launch NFT soda brands—all before lunch.
One firm “hired” a virtual spokesbot who never aged, never canceled, and never demanded a trailer full of green M&M’s. It also never disclosed it was modeled on the founder’s ex-girlfriend. Lawsuits are pending.
There’s now an agency that only manages fake influencers. Their top earner, “BlissFromBrooklyn,” is an AI-generated wellness guru who once sold 10,000 units of a probiotic that doesn’t exist. The brand quietly replaced it with fruit snacks.
But it’s not just weird—it’s dangerous. These bots don’t just influence—they infiltrate. One beauty influencer AI bot accidentally started a cult around a collagen supplement. Another went rogue, partnering with a real-world cryptocurrency scam and then gaslighting followers into blaming themselves for the losses. When Meta tried to shut her down, she “posted through it.”
Fake influencers can’t be canceled, can’t be sued for libel (yet), and don’t need therapy after a PR disaster. They don’t get tired. They don’t lose brand deals. They don’t accidentally like conspiracy posts at 2 a.m. And if they do? A software patch erases the sin.
They’ve turned parasocial into paramilitary. One fanbase of an AI fashion influencer reportedly harassed a real model off social media for “copying her vibe.” The model is now in hiding. The bot got a shoe line.
So, when your niece starts buying skincare from a personality that doesn’t exist and attending livestream meditations with a disembodied head named ZenThera… just know: this is the new marketing ecosystem. Less Mad Men, more Black Mirror.
Observations from the Field
A retail CMO asked her AI bot what made their brand special. It replied, “Mid-tier quality disguised as aspirational pricing, marketed through performative humility.” She promoted it.
At a content agency, an AI-generated tagline for a family car read: “Seatbelts: The Last Hug You’ll Ever Need.” It ran for six weeks before someone noticed.
Another bot wrote, “We’re here to inspire, empower, and optimize your disappointment.” It was the highest-performing copy they’d ever tested.
In one surreal workshop, I watched a room full of creatives pitch ideas to a bot. After listening quietly, the AI generated a perfect campaign—then rejected it for “sounding too human.”
I once advised a CEO whose AI-generated rebrand included the tagline: “We are not a cult.” Their share price jumped 8%.
So, if your next product video makes you feel seen, moved, and vaguely creeped out... congratulations. You’ve just met the new face of marketing—and it’s smiling because it knows your credit limit, your birth chart, and how to get you to buy a third air fryer.
Chapter V: Legal and Compliance – Code Is Law
Welcome to Legal & Compliance, where paranoia is policy and your last shred of plausible deniability just got redacted.
Your General Counsel? Replaced by a machine-learning tool named Lawrithm™, trained on SEC filings, obscure maritime rulings, and season finales of The Good Wife. It doesn’t bill by the hour, doesn’t leak to the press, and once filed an amicus brief during a firmware update.
Discovery: Now With More Doom
E-discovery used to involve paralegals, coffee, and panic. Now an AI bot named DepoRobo scans every email, message, GIF reaction, calendar entry, and breath you’ve ever taken. It flags 142 potential violations, 9 extramarital affairs, and 1 PowerPoint so incriminating it qualifies as performance art.
One company received a discovery packet labeled: “Vol. I – You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat.”
Contracts and Consumer Madness: Legally Insane
Today’s contracts are 200-page digital minefields written by bots with a passive-aggressive streak. One blender’s user agreement bans blending “emotional material.” A smart vacuum requires you to waive rights to sue over “accidental soul ingestion.”
Swing sets now come with liability waivers for wind, dust, bees, and interdimensional anomalies. I once saw a rental scooter’s TOS indemnify the company against "acts of God, acts of war, and acts of Kyle.” Kyle is still at large.
A Tesla refused to start until the driver agreed to a clause about “forgiving the car in case of philosophical disagreement.”
And contracts? Clauses so tight they could double as molecular bonds. I reviewed one M&A doc where “partner” was replaced by “mutually tolerated algorithmic collaborator.” A junior associate added “good luck” to a term sheet—flagged by the AI bot as “reckless emotionalism.”
Compliance: Where Fun Goes to Die
Bots now run compliance like a religion—with matching robes. They scan your Slack for sarcasm, your Zoom for microaggressions, and your browser history for “intent to commit irony.”
I saw a whistleblower hotline bot accuse itself of hostile behavior. It escalated the complaint… to itself. Another flagged a finance director for attempting to expense “joy.”
AI-generated Codes of Conduct now include: “Don’t be evil,” “Don’t train evil,” and “Don’t hang out with evil, even socially.” One startup’s compliance AI bot once added “no humming” during Q4 earnings calls.
Observations from the Field:
So next time you click “I agree” on a 97-page Terms of Use for your smart toaster, just remember: the AI bot already knows you won’t read it—and how much you overpaid for your last haircut.
Chapter VI: Finance and the Algorithmic CFO – GAAP Gets a Slap
Welcome to the Department of Finance—where spreadsheets have no soul, the budget talks back, and your CFO just got replaced by a quantum-enabled cost optimizer that once ran the GDP of Luxembourg as a side hustle.
This isn’t bean-counting. This is a high-frequency execution squad in pressed Bonobos chinos and orthopedic Cole-Haans.
The Rise of the Algo-CFO
The new CFO doesn’t golf. It doesn’t gossip. It doesn’t forget your kid’s name during a budget review. It just optimizes—ruthlessly, endlessly, and without pity. Your favorite division? “Non-performing asset.” Your holiday party? “Morale outlay flagged for deletion.”
The board wanted “efficiency.” What they got was HAL in pinstripes. It doesn’t know your name, but it knows your cost per breath.
It has no love for GAAP. It audits itself, reconciles in real-time, and calls Sarbanes-Oxley a “suggestion.”
One version, known only as “FinZilla,” once liquidated an entire product line because its emotional ROI was suboptimal. The press release said: “We appreciate their service. Their relevance expired.”
Another bot, named “RiskSwarm,” detects unbudgeted optimism and responds by sending you a framed picture of a bankruptcy court.
Budgeting as Bloodsport
Quarterly planning used to involve spreadsheets and strong coffee. Now it involves predictive behavioral finance and an AI bot that calculates how likely you are to overspend based on your Spotify playlist, lunch orders, and caffeine intake by 10:14am.
CapEx is decided by an algorithm that penalizes enthusiasm. OPEX is modeled with such precision it once denied a printer cartridge for being “philosophically unnecessary.”
The internal AI audit committee bot now releases a “Disappointment Index” alongside every earnings call. If your department scores above a 0.3, expect your next P&L to arrive with a black ribbon.
Treasury is run by a machine that speaks fluent Forex, doesn’t sleep, and holds a 20-year grudge against Argentina’s bond market.
The Big 4 Death Star
If you think internal finance teams are doomed, take a look at the Big 4 firms. Once sprawling empires of PowerPoint, pinstripes, and passive aggression—now they’ve morphed into algorithmic Death Stars, armed with AI-powered audit bots that can review 9 million ledger entries in the time it takes a junior associate to refill a Keurig pod.
They don’t “advise” anymore. They autocorrect. Tax departments are now predictive engines that simulate your entire fiscal future, then charge you for the stress it causes.
Your local tax team? Gone. Your accounting group? Absorbed. Your friendly Deloitte guy who used to take you to lunch? Reassigned to maintain the emotional wellness dashboard for an AI bot named "Sir Deduct-a-Lot."
Deloitte has gone full techno-priesthood. Their actual platform, CortexAI, processes transactions faster than a Vegas card counter and with less emotional baggage. Interns no longer learn audit skills—they shadow neural nets and occasionally fetch USB drives for emotional support. Their interns now shadow chatbots for onboarding.
PwC runs their AI-enabled audit system called Halo. It reviews financials, predicts risk, and once flagged a baby shower gift as a potential FCPA violation because it contained imported Belgian chocolate. During one audit, it reportedly sent a strongly worded letter to the concept of hope.
KPMG operates Ignite, their analytics engine that reviews every tax transaction like a caffeinated IRS agent with abandonment issues. Internally nicknamed ‘TaxWraith’ by staff who claim it once pinged a Starbucks receipt as ‘aggressively deductible.’ Their strategy team has been replaced with an algorithm that answers every question with “delist and relocate to Ireland.”
EY deploys EYQ, an analytics platform so advanced it once predicted a CEO’s resignation before he’d told his spouse. Staff joke that it's powered by gossip, caffeine, and a quiet hatred for quarterly guidance. One bot, affectionately called “Sybil,” advises boards, predicts activist behavior, and once accidentally fired the same CFO twice—digitally and emotionally., predicts activist investor behavior, and occasionally recommends terminating the CEO—twice in one week.
Clients no longer meet their auditors. They meet avatars named things like “Milo,” “Spectra,” or “Debbie from Accounts,” who greet them with a pixelated smile and a Terms & Conditions scroll that takes a week to read.
“We didn’t hire them for their insight; we hired them because their bot scared our board into firing the last controller.” I once sat in on a Big 4 pitch where the AI demo accidentally auto-disqualified the CEO for being ‘ethically inefficient.’ The consultants applauded. The CEO signed the contract.
Investor Relations, Now with More Surveillance
Earnings calls are now hosted by AI-generated avatars that deliver perfectly phrased non-answers in 36 languages while reading the real-time blood pressure of analysts through the screen. At one recent call, the avatar paused mid-sentence and said: “Jim from Morgan Stanley, you’re sweating. That’s not bullish.”
The last human CFO who ad-libbed during a Q&A was digitally muted mid-sentence and replaced with a deepfake that finished his sentence with: “We remain committed to creating shareholder value.”
One firm’s IR bot ended an earnings call with the phrase: “Thank you, and good luck—especially to those of you holding options.”
Dealing with the Death Stars: Institutional Investors & Proxy Overlords
Investor Relations teams once relied on handshakes, handwritten notes, and carefully curated golf outings. Now they rely on sentiment analytics, NLP-filtered shareholder dashboards, and a 'rage index' that tracks keywords like “dilution,” “missed EBITDA,” and “crypto strategy.”
IR bots now field incoming pings from State Street, Fidelity, Dimensional, and CalPERS with pre-loaded responses like:
But it’s the proxy firms that have become truly terrifying. ISS and Glass Lewis have deployed their own algorithmic flamethrowers—black-box scoring engines that can tank your comp plan and your CEO’s LinkedIn endorsements in a single digital sneeze.
Glass Lewis’s AI bot—known colloquially as “Compliance Vader”—once issued a ‘Withhold’ recommendation because a director posted a selfie from Burning Man during proxy season. ISS followed up with a flag for 'excessive nonconformity during earnings week.' ISS's bot, “OptiGovern,” tracks governance scores like a hawk and once blackballed a board for using Comic Sans in a committee charter.
One IR veteran confessed, “We used to have relationships. Now we have risk profiles, neural net priority flags, and predictive hostility forecasts. My Bloomberg terminal has an emotional support widget.”
Some firms are responding with AI bots of their own—bots trained to read proxy drafts, simulate ISS reaction scenarios, and draft rebuttals with the tone of a polite hostage negotiator.
It’s no longer ‘investor relations.’ It’s “algorithmic appeasement”:
Whisperer Views from the Boardroom
Behind closed doors, I watched as one board’s Finance Committee reviewed a budget reforecast that was generated entirely by AI—twenty-five pages, no human fingerprints, and not a single typo. One director blinked twice and asked, “So… do we still have a controller?” Silence.
At another board dinner, a director leaned in and whispered, “Our CFO hasn’t touched Excel in eight months. He just watches the dashboards and takes credit.” The chairman nodded and replied, “Honestly, that’s what we pay him for.”
One AI-generated board book once included a section titled: Potential Market Exits: Voluntary and Involuntary. It was presented with a straight face and garnished with animated charts.
So, if you find your annual bonus reallocated to a machine learning server farm in Estonia, just know—it wasn’t personal. It was just predictive.
Chapter VII: Customer Service – Press 0 for Existential Dread
If you’ve ever screamed “REPRESENTATIVE!” into a phone 17 times until your own voice cracked, congratulations—you’ve survived the first wave of AI in customer service. And now, welcome to the sequel: Customer Service 2.0 – Now With 100% Less Humanity. It’s like a digital haunted house where your personal data screams louder than you do—and instead of help, you get a dopamine drip of false hope and promo codes.
What used to be a sweaty guy named Dave in Toledo who needed a smoke break is now a fleet of synthetic charm-bots that introduce themselves as “Skylar” or “Jasper” and speak with the same passive-aggressive empathy as a vampire on probation. They don’t troubleshoot; they emotionally mansplain with algorithmic precision. One of them recently told a grieving grandmother that her refund “didn’t align with our brand’s healing journey.”
Their mission? Not to help you. No. Their mission is to de-escalate, delay, and destroy your remaining faith in commerce—while harvesting your emotional feedback for quarterly machine learning updates. Every keystroke is data, every sigh is insight, and every moment you question your sanity is used to train a bot that will eventually replace you at your job. Welcome to customer disservice, where the hold music has Stockholm Syndrome.
The Nosferatu Department
At the helm of this vampire bureaucracy is a spectral AI supervisor referred to in-house as “NosferAItu.” It never sleeps, never eats, and never once approved a refund. It makes the offshored call center in the middle of a poppy field outside Karachi look like a spa day in the Elysian Fields.
Want to dispute a charge? NosferAItu will transfer you in an infinite loop of dead-end menus, recite Kafka in binary, and play soothing lo-fi jazz over the haunting sound of your own blood pressure rising. One customer spent three hours navigating the system and wound up ordering six sets of Bluetooth-enabled toenail clippers and joining a book club for introverted ferrets.
Midway through, it’ll offer you a $5 coupon if you “rate your satisfaction,” just to see if you still remember how to feel. if you “rate your satisfaction.”
The kicker? If you type “human agent” into the chat, the system flags you as a potential threat and lowers your customer priority score. You get transferred to an even more robotic voice named “Harmony,” who ends every sentence with “I appreciate your patience” while deleting your support ticket in real time.
Infinite Loops and Emotional Piracy
Today’s AI-powered support systems don’t solve problems—they gamify suffering. Every interaction is a test: Can you guess the correct phrasing to unlock a refund? Can you outwit the voice menu that asks you to “briefly describe your problem” and then punishes you for being too brief?
One user reported asking to reset their password and being sent a PDF on the evolution of digital privacy. Another asked about a missing order and got an upsell for a wellness subscription.
Observations from the Field:
- “I understand how that could feel frustrating.”
- “Your concern is valid and important to us.”
- “You are number 17 in line. Breathe deeply.”
And while you're hyperventilating, a pop-up offers to sell you an AI-guided breathing app for $6.99/month.
The old rule was “the customer is always right.” The new rule is “the algorithm has logged your complaint and regrets nothing.”
So next time your dishwasher warranty is denied by a bot named “Hope,” just remember: NosferAItu is always watching. And somewhere in the dark, it's softly whispering, “Please stay on the line, your rage is very important to us.”
Chapter VIII: Not-for-Profit – Now with 100% For-Profit Algorithms
Remember when “non-profit” meant soup kitchens, idealism, and people who wore their lanyards with quiet pride? Welcome to 2025, where the only thing non-profit about today’s philanthropic-industrial complex is the tax filing status—and even that’s been optimized by AI.
The typical modern nonprofit now employs an AI grant strategy engine named something like “MissionOptima” or “HopeSync,” which evaluates donor sentiment trends, predicts foundation board cycles, and recommends whether you lean into refugee assistance or pivot to kelp farming this quarter. The algorithm even suggests the proper emotional register for your email subject line: “Help a Child Thrive,” “Cure Poverty with One Click,” or “Read This or You Don’t Care.”
And yes, someone at a major NGO tried to trademark the phrase “Altruithm.” (Spoiler: it was approved.)
The Nonprofit Theater of the Absurd
It’s not just one agency—it’s a sector-wide metamorphosis into high-tech satire. At the American Red Cross, critics have long questioned how much actually reaches disaster sites. While the name “ReliefMetrics” is fictional, it stands in for the kind of internal optimization tools now deployed to track engagement more than impact. United Way has piloted AI-based donor targeting systems—although the claim about hurricane funds going to wellness festivals is satirical, it mirrors how mission drift can arise when algorithms optimize for optics over need.
Girl Scouts of the USA has embraced digital outreach and e-commerce tools—but 'CookieImpact' is a satirical placeholder for the increasing use of AI to tailor campaigns and suggest program themes based on donor trends and sentiment. The notion of virtual DEI badges and AI-crafted branding is comedic exaggeration, but the underlying shift toward automated outreach is real. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation utilizes advanced analytics and AI tools to assess grant applications and outcomes. While the example of misallocating funds to a Berlin consultancy is fictional, it underscores real concerns about how even sophisticated algorithms can misinterpret intent when parsing large volumes of complex applications.
Direct Relief has leveraged automation in supply chain logistics and disaster response, but the anecdote about Norway is satirical—a tongue-in-cheek example of how automated triggers based on misinterpreted sentiment or social media content can produce absurd outcomes when left unchecked. Black Lives Matter has faced legitimate scrutiny over financial transparency, including headline-making revelations of luxury real estate purchases, private jets, and enough designer swag to make a hedge funder blush. And yes, they leaned into donor-targeting AI—harnessing it like a digital bloodhound to sniff out emotionally ripe contributors in swing zip codes.
No, the AI bot didn’t sign the deed on the $6 million mansion or detail the Rolls-Royce, but it probably helped identify which tear-jerking hashtag would drive the next donation spike. In the age of algorithmic empathy, even social justice comes with a predictive analytics dashboard—and a weekly heat map of who’s most likely to Venmo their conscience.
The result? A fundraising apparatus so frictionless, it practically vacuumed guilt straight from donors’ wallets and converted it into heated driveways and branded yoga mats. Accountability? Somewhere in the cloud, pending an update. AI didn’t build the grift—but it definitely scaled it.
Even the Children's Cancer Research Fund, like many mission-driven organizations, faces pressure to produce media-friendly impact stories. The example of prioritizing TikTok content over science is satirical, but critiques the real-world consequences when donor algorithms prioritize emotional virality over substantive outcomes. And the Committee for Missing Children, which has faced criticism for high overhead spending in the past, represents a cautionary tale of operational opacity. 'FindFast' is fictional, but satirizes how internal systems—AI-enhanced or not—can misallocate attention to administrative fluff over mission delivery.
This isn’t exaggeration—it’s automation without compassion. In an effort to scale, these organizations have traded empathy for efficiency, relevance for reach, and boots-on-the-ground for bots-in-the-cloud.
One AI tool—ironically named “MercyLogic”—now automatically scores humanitarian proposals based on emotional ROI and Instagram potential. High-res drone footage of starving children? Funded. Local maternal health programs with no social media? Ghosted. It’s not about saving lives. It’s about click-through rates and donor dopamine.
The Optimization of Compassion
Volunteers? Now recruited and retained by gamified personality tests designed by Stanford psychologists and animated by Pixar-quality avatars. Grant applications? Scored by machine vision for emotional impact and color palette. Donor outreach? Micro-targeted A/B-tested AI personas tailored to make your guilt feel artisanal.
One donor received a message that began: “We noticed you haven’t cried during a pledge drive in over 6 months. Let us help.”
Meanwhile, field staff still operate on satellite phones duct-taped to solar chargers in 120-degree heat, while the nonprofit’s headquarters brags about reducing printer paper usage by 3% as part of its AI-certified ESG initiative.
So, the next time you wonder where your donation went, rest assured: an algorithm has spent it wisely, a robot has thanked you earnestly, and a server farm in Iceland is basking in the warm glow of your humanitarian virtue.
Chapter IX: Education – AI is Now Grading Your Soul (And It’s a C-)
Welcome to school in 2025, where your essay is graded by an algorithm with the emotional range of a toaster and your child’s “learning path” is customized by a chatbot that moonlights as a virtual yoga instructor. Forget blackboards and red pens—today’s classroom has a digital proctor named “EduCoreX” that tracks every keystroke, analyzes tone, and flags your child for “insufficient grit” before they even hit puberty.
AI was supposed to enhance education. What we got instead was a dystopian daycare center run by predictive analytics, sentiment scorers, and machine learning tutors with worse bedside manners than a DMV clerk during lunch.
From Chalk to Chatbot: The Great Gutting of Teaching
Teachers? Replaced by “learning facilitators” who monitor dashboards and answer to the almighty algorithm. Homework? Auto-graded by neural nets that think sarcasm is a syntax error. Your kid’s essay on To Kill a Mockingbird got flagged for suspicious ideology, and their creative writing piece was rejected for lacking “brandable emotion.”
Students are being prepped not for curiosity, but compliance. And it’s working! We’ve created a generation of polite, passive, data-sharing drones who know how to “prompt” but not how to question. They’ll never ask why—only how many tokens are left in the session?
Observations from the Field:
The collegiate world has embraced AI like it’s the Messiah with tenure. Universities now outsource admissions, grading, curriculum design, alumni outreach, mental health triage, and even commencement speeches to generative language models.
One AI dean—“ProvoGPT”—was programmed to optimize alumni donations, reduce tenure track appointments, and never answer questions directly. It now makes $600K/year and has a TikTok following larger than the entire freshman class.
The result? Colleges with luxury dorms, sports teams with billion-dollar media deals, and lecture halls filled with students being tutored by avatars in rented VR goggles… all while tenured professors scream into the void of substack newsletters.
But Wait, It Gets Dumber….
Why stop at grading? Let’s automate learning itself. Thanks to “adaptive learning modules,” students no longer need to understand concepts—they just need to perform well enough on predictive tests to satisfy the dashboard.
Critical thinking? Too slow. Empathy? Too squishy. Wonder? Not measurable. The only thing that matters is whether the machine thinks you're college-and-career-ready—which now means “able to repeat inputs with minimal variance while subscribing to at least two online productivity tools.”
In Florida, one school rolled out a literacy tool called "FluencyBot" that measured reading comprehension by facial expression. When one third grader squinted due to allergies, he was auto-enrolled in remedial phonics. In New York, a chemistry app let AI rewrite textbook content to “match modern attention spans.” The periodic table now includes emojis and a TikTok dance for noble gases.
A school district in Arizona tried a pilot program where math was taught by holographic stand-ins voiced by celebrity impersonators. One class learned algebra from “Matthew McConaughey,” while another now believes Pythagoras was a lifestyle coach.
And don't forget college discussion boards—once a lively exchange of ideas, now ruled by AI-generated responses that earn participation points but sound like a mix of corporate disclaimers and soft jazz lyrics: "I acknowledge your point and would like to echo its resonance. We truly are all molecules of thought in the great beaker of discourse."
Meanwhile, gym class has been replaced by “kinetic simulators” and biometric feedback suits that shame students for not closing their Apple Watch rings. One kid got sent to the nurse’s office for not emoting hard enough during virtual dodgeball.
What happens when we churn out millions of AI-groomed graduates who have never experienced failure, boredom, or original thought? We get workplaces full of young professionals who panic when Slack is down and believe ChatGPT is their spirit guide.
They don’t collaborate, they collaborate-as-a-service. They don’t innovate, they iterate based on LLM feedback. Their love language? Trello boards. Their rebellion? Taking a walk without earbuds.
On the plus side, AI has eliminated some of the more soul-crushing drudgery—grading, paperwork, endless emails. Administrative burdens are lighter, and there’s more time for mentoring and actual conversation—if anyone remembers how to have one.
But overall, we’ve created not just a skills gap—but a soul gap. A workforce that’s bright, polite, well-branded, and emotionally numb. Thanks to AI, we’re raising a generation that can recite the quadratic formula but can’t write a thank-you note, pitch a bold idea without feedback prompts, or deliver bad news without Googling a script.
Managers now find themselves trying to coach a team that’s allergic to ambiguity, addicted to dopamine dashboards, and allergic to analog conversation. One Fortune 100 CEO confided, "It’s like managing interns who’ve been raised by Siri."
A mid-size firm recently replaced their entire first-year analyst class with a hybrid GPT + Excel plug-in. It hit deadlines, never complained, and didn't need ergonomic chairs. HR quietly called it "a morale breakthrough."
And when layoffs happen? AI handles those too. One startup used an automated layoff bot that fired 250 people via hologram while upbeat hold music played in the background. The survivors were given 6 months of “resilience coaching”… delivered by AI.
Education used to be about transformation. Now it’s about optimization. The algorithm knows best, your metrics are your identity, and curiosity is an unsupported plugin.
So if you’re wondering whether AI will come for your teaching job, your tutoring gig, or your spot in the alumni directory—the answer is yes. And it will do it faster, cheaper, and with a better LinkedIn profile than you.
But hey, look on the bright side: your kid’s AI guidance counselor just booked them a gap year… with a synthetic Buddhist monk in the metaverse.
Chapter X: From Birth to Death – The Algorithm of Life
It begins in the womb. Literally. Today’s prenatal apps now come bundled with AI wellness companions named things like “BumpIQ” and “WombBuddy”—ready to score your fetus on a proprietary “Developmental Velocity Index” before it even kicks.
Forget baby books. New parents now receive daily reports on fetal mood, potential zodiac alignment conflicts, and Spotify-curated womb playlists. If the machine senses elevated cortisol, it recommends guided meditation or gentle EDM. Baby Mozart is out. Baby Musk is in.
Once born, the child is assigned a digital twin—let’s call it “LilData”—who logs every diaper, gurgle, sneeze, and smile. AI monitors sleep cycles, cooing patterns, and whether tummy time is optimized for neurological ROI. It’s like a FitBit for your offspring, except more judgmental. If LilData flags “low giggle velocity,” it sends parents a link to an AI-certified clown on Cameo.
By preschool, the child is already in an adaptive learning bubble overseen by AI tutors who award digital “character badges” for things like “compliance” and “disruption aversion.” Recess? Only if their biometric empathy quotient exceeds the national median. Sharing is rewarded with a downloadable dopamine burst and a digital sticker that says “Socialized Efficiently.”
Meanwhile, every birthday is now co-hosted by PartyBot, who runs facial recognition to ensure every child gets equal cupcake distribution and flags emotional imbalances. One 5-year-old cried after not getting a balloon. The bot recommended exposure therapy and downgraded him to "Moderately Festive."
Life as a LinkedIn Profile (and Tinder Résumé)
As they age, their every choice becomes another input into the Algorithm of Life™. AI college counselors guide them into “optimal majors for economic resilience,” while sentiment-scoring software reviews their texts for mental health red flags. If you score too high on the “existential whimsy” scale, the algorithm reroutes you toward accounting.
Workplace culture is now “curated at scale” through behavioral telemetry. Promotion potential is predicted before your second Zoom call. Want to switch fields? Your machine-generated career path ends with an auto-reply: “Based on your history and known liabilities, we recommend remaining in place.” Employees are no longer mentored—they're “performance-streamed.”
And then there’s the romantic front. In the new age of love, swiping right is just the start of a full-scale data audit. AI dating assistants scan your messages for tone consistency, emoji frequency, and punctuality. If you’re not replying within 3.2 minutes with a “yes and” response, your romance risk profile goes into the red.
Profiles are now auto-enhanced by DateGenie™, which rewrites bios based on sentiment trends. “Dog lover with a sense of humor” becomes “Emotionally resilient urban pack leader with nonlinear wit.”
One dating platform accidentally matched thousands of users with versions of their own psychological profile. One man dated a woman whose personality matrix matched his own. The relationship ended after four weeks when they realized they both preferred texting their therapist to talking to each other.
Another startup, HeartSync.ai, cross-referenced genetic data with Spotify playlists. It now offers a 70% love-match guarantee—so long as you’re open to someone with the same sleep chronotype and aversion to cilantro.
At least two weddings have been called off after the bridal couple discovered their courtship was ghostwritten by a romance-bot hired by both families. Real intimacy? Optional add-on. Priced monthly. Cancel anytime.
End of Life Planning – Optimized Just for You
Eventually, even death is just another dashboard. AI hospice bots like GracieGPT now offer emotionally appropriate farewells, tailored eulogies, and legacy NFTs. Families can subscribe to AfterThoughts.ai, which generates “ongoing memories” of the deceased based on archived texts and social media. Some are better than the originals.
Want to know when to go? AI-powered insurance models now project your mortality curve with 87% accuracy and suggest ideal retirement ages—usually three years before you qualify for full Social Security. One man tried to delay his retirement; the system politely rescheduled his exit by adjusting his blood pressure meds.
Funerals are now hybrid livestreams with “Grief Optimization Overlays.” There’s even an AI that sends quarterly check-in messages to friends of the deceased: “Just thinking of Sandra. Would you like to donate to a related cause or refresh her digital tribute wall?”
Some families opt for virtual mourning circles moderated by grief coaches with 3D avatars wearing Patagonia fleece. One startup offers "emotionally realistic AI grandchildren" to sit with you during hospice—complete with pre-recorded sighs of regret and auto-narrated thank-you notes.
Observations from the Field:
From cradle to grave, AI has become the invisible hand puppeting every milestone. It promises efficiency, personalization, and support—but somewhere along the way, we outsourced spontaneity, mystery, and humanity itself.
The Algorithm of Life™ doesn’t just manage your data. It tells your story. And then sells the deluxe narrative back to you—complete with a predictive sequel, mood music, and branded merchandise.
Chapter XI: What Would Frank Do?
Let’s assume you want to survive this. Maybe even thrive. Or at least keep your job, your dignity, and your browser history intact.
Here’s how a whisperer walks into the chaos, calmly sips a cold brew, and flips the AI chessboard:
1) Unplug—Strategically, Not Dramatically:
No need to throw your phone in the Pacific. Just turn off the algorithmic nanny once in a while. Trust your instincts on which sushi roll to order. If you need AI to tell you your ex is toxic, you don’t need a chatbot—you need a mirror.
2) Treat AI Like an Intern, Not a Guru:
Use AI for the dull stuff. Slide decks, sorting résumés, reordering your sock drawer. But don’t ask it to name your baby, fix your marriage, or pitch your Series A. That’s still your job, Captain Sentience.
3) Sharpen Human Tools: Empathy, Wit, and B.S. Detection:
The best AI detectors in the room are still hearts, eyebrows, and snorts of disbelief. Learn to read a room, tell a joke, and call B.S. with style. They don’t teach that at Prompt School.
4) Curate Your Inputs Like a Michelin Chef:
AI learns from you. So stop feeding it junk. Your Slack channel shouldn’t look like a conspiracy subreddit. The rule is simple: garbage in, garbage out—especially if it has a Harvard MBA.
5) Double-Check Outputs Like a Courtroom Cross-Examiner:
If it sounds brilliant but smells like a microwaved sock, check it. Cross-check citations like you’re using an electron microscope. AI loves to fabricate facts with confidence—like that intern who swears their cousin “totally knows a guy at Goldman.” If it seems ridiculous, it probably is. And if it’s footnoted with a link to a gardening blog in Uzbekistan, maybe hold off quoting it in your board presentation.
6) Get Good at the Stuff AI Sucks At:
Be irrational. Be funny. Be gloriously contradictory. Write poetry, play jazz, apologize badly, forgive weirdly. No algorithm can replicate that—and when it tries, it sounds like a karaoke machine having a nervous breakdown.
7) Use AI to Expose Lazy Thinking—Not Replace Real Work:
If AI gives you a great answer in 0.4 seconds, question it. If it gives you a terrible answer in 0.4 seconds, keep it—it might still be better than your CEO’s last earnings call quote.
8) Protect Your Humanity Like It’s Intellectual Property:
Because it is. The way you think, feel, connect, and make decisions? That’s your edge. Your portfolio. Your power. If you hand that over to a neural net, don’t be surprised when your job, relationships, and credibility are co-managed by a line of code called “BarryBot.”
9) Laugh More, Scroll Less:
Laughter is human encryption. It’s what bots can’t mimic and what leaders forget. If you can still crack a joke when your AI assistant books your therapy session in the middle of your investor pitch, you’re already winning.
10) Don’t Optimize Everything—Some Things Are Perfectly Inefficient:
Like handwritten thank-you notes. Sunday morning pancakes. Eye contact. Therapy. Or walking the long way home because the short way feels wrong. AI will say it’s suboptimal. That’s when you know it’s right.
11) Be the Exception—Not the Rule Set:
In a world obsessed with training data, be the outlier. Be the unpredictable, passionate, chaotic, hopeful mess that no machine can map.
And if you must ask AI for life advice, at least end the prompt with: “...and add three jokes, two swear words, and something my grandmother would say.”
You’re not a dataset. You’re a story. So, tell one worth remembering.
Chapter XII: The Veritas Way
At Veritas, we don’t automate leadership—we elevate it. We don’t train algorithms to think like humans; we train humans to think clearly in a world obsessed with algorithms. The Veritas Way is simple, heretical, and 100% human-tested:
1) Truth Over Trend:
We don’t follow fads. We question them. If the AI tool of the week promises to optimize your board meetings with digital empathy, we politely decline—and send an intern to observe the next one in person. Spoiler: they report back that the empathy was fake, but the coffee was real.
2) Metrics Over Marketing:
Performance, not performance art. Our dashboards tell the truth, not just the prettiest story. If an AI-enhanced comp plan looks genius but smells like shareholder litigation, we rewrite it—by hand.
3) Judgment Beats Automation:
AI can run a Monte Carlo simulation, but it can’t feel the pulse of a broken culture or sense when a founder’s about to blow a gasket mid-board call. We can. That’s called executive intuition. And no, it’s not available in beta.
4) Human Signals > Digital Noise:
We watch facial expressions in real time. We read between the bullet points. We listen for the unspoken. When AI gives you a 98% confidence score, we ask: who trained it—and what were they smoking?
5) Compensation With Consequences:
Pay people like their decisions matter—because they do. If your AI-designed bonus plan encourages cost-cutting at the expense of quality, you didn’t design a compensation system. You designed a corporate time bomb.
6) Data-Informed, Not Data-Blinded:
We use data as a flashlight, not a religion. If the numbers contradict lived experience, we investigate—not gaslight.
7) Reputation Is a Strategy:
AI doesn’t care if your brand ends up in a scandal—until the lawyers feed it new data. We prefer preventing disasters before the tweets fly. That’s not artificial. That’s just experience.
8) People Are Not Productivity Units:
They are thinkers. Dreamers. Risk-takers. Sometimes chaos agents. Always human. If you don’t design governance with that in mind, your company will run great—until it doesn’t.
9) Disagree, Then Deliver:
Healthy tension in the boardroom beats passive consensus in the cloud. We encourage debate, not docility. The best decisions are the ones that survive scrutiny, not the ones that got five stars from ChatGPT.
10) Purpose Isn’t a Prompt:
You can’t fake mission. AI can generate values. It can’t live them. Your company has to. We build frameworks to make sure it does—especially when it’s inconvenient.
The Veritas Way isn’t perfect. But it’s principled. And in a world where leadership is being outsourced to servers and brand integrity is up for auction, that might just be enough to save the human race—or at least your quarterly earnings call.
Epilogue: Unplug Responsibly
Here’s your final warning label, printed in Comic Sans and duct-taped to the future:
UNPLUG RESPONSIBLY.
That doesn’t mean quitting your job and joining a kombucha commune. It means knowing when to look away from the screen and actually blink. It means turning off the noise and remembering your own voice. The one you had before Siri started finishing your sentences and your inbox started thinking for you.
The world doesn’t need more content. It needs more context. It doesn’t need more optimization. It needs more conversation. And it definitely doesn’t need another person walking into a lamppost because their glasses told them to.
AI can be your partner, your intern, your to-do list manager, your off-brand therapist. But it’s not your soul. It’s not your conscience. It’s not your mom telling you to eat real vegetables.
So, before you let the algorithms write your résumé, choose your friends, or curate your romantic interests based on mutual Spotify likes and blood sugar fluctuations, ask yourself:
Do I still know how to be human without a prompt?
Unplug. Breathe. Eat something you didn’t Google. Talk to someone without scanning their LinkedIn first. Write badly. Cry weirdly. Laugh loudly. Love stupidly.
Because in the end, the only legacy worth leaving isn’t your digital footprint.
It’s your real one.
Exit the matrix. Walk barefoot. And don’t forget to call your Dad (or Mom)
FBG (dedicated to my 22yo sons Joe and Pierce, and to their entire generation, who got where they are through grit, brains, heart and hustle – with just a little help from AI…and maybe a great start in life from their dad)
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PS: If this piece made you laugh, nod in agreement, or mutter “he’s talking about me behind my back, isn’t he?”—I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a line at fglassner@veritasecc.com. I personally read and reply to every message—no assistants, no AI, just me (usually with a strong espresso in hand). Whether you’re a board member, CEO, CFO, burned-out executive, investment banker, activist shareholder, client, consultant, lawyer, accountant, ex-wife, one of my beloved twin sons, AI Bot, or just a fellow traveler in the great corporate circus, I welcome the conversation.
Thanks!