In recent weeks, I’ve watched something shift in how the largest companies think about their communications functions: Not a new tool, not a new title, but a fundamental rethinking of how the work actually gets done. Corporate communications leaders are increasingly involved in shaping business decisions, not just authoring statements defending them.

Ask most modern CCOs, and they’ll tell you that traditional media relations — once what the function was known for — is now a small part of the job. The larger piece is enterprise impact: Monitoring, assessing and evaluating how external stakeholders and developments will impact the broader health of the business and its ability to deliver results.

That’s a meaningful change from where this function sat a decade ago, but most org charts haven’t caught up. Many communications functions are still designed around vertical ownership: Corporate comms owns the broad-based external narrative, public affairs owns the narrative to global policymakers, brand communications owns the narrative to customers, employee comms owns the internal story and investor relations owns the financial message. Each team is good at its job, and each optimizes for its own lane.

Unfortunately, in our current era, that’s precisely the problem. Again, modern CCOs will tell you that most enterprise developments no longer land neatly in these different lanes. A restructuring hits Wall Street, the workforce and the media simultaneously. A product recall is a regulatory, customer, employee and brand question simultaneously. In an environment where everyone is media, the gaps in a public narrative become clear more quickly.

A different world demands a different architecture, and the most effective enterprises have figured out something crucial: The modern communications team must organize around the work, not just the function. In my work helping communications teams navigate restructuring, I’ve found that companies do best when they define their work as workflows, via a practice of horizontal collaboration. In this model, the communications function ceases to be a series of parallel tracks and becomes a single operating layer. Corporate comms, employee comms, investor relations, legal and government affairs work together toward a common end goal. The leader serves as the orchestra conductor, navigating what is quiet, what is loud and what is in harmony in real time as essential decisions are made.

A critical structural component of this horizontal shift is the rise of what I call “strong COEs,” short for “centers of excellence.” In the past, a COE might have been a handful of people making tools or templates. Today, they are dynamic hubs designed to scale complex activities like crisis management, employee communications, media relations and creative work. Driven by the extreme volatility and lack of predictability in the external environment, companies are increasingly redirecting resources from decentralized business unit teams to centralized COEs to avoid duplication and achieve efficiencies. It’s a highly practical move: If BU1 is quiet but BU2 is facing a massive crisis, a CCO with a strong COE can instantly pivot and redeploy specialized crisis leads to the fire. This approach not only standardizes operations and eliminates narrative gaps, but it also gives CCOs the agility to dedicate resources precisely when and where they are needed most.

In practice, moving to a workflow model requires several concrete shifts in how teams operate day to day. Decisions happen in cross-functional forums, not via sequential handoffs. This means no more throwing a draft over the fence to legal or IR and waiting days for a response. Issues are owned collectively, not routed by function. The team swarms the problem, rather than debating whose “lane” it falls into. Leaders spend time orchestrating strategy, not just approving or aligning. The CCO acts as the conductor, not editor-in-chief. Teams are deployed dynamically, not fixed permanently to specific business units. Resources flow to the highest enterprise risk or opportunity.

To see this in action, consider how a workflow model handles a sudden cybersecurity breach. In a siloed organization, the IT team alerts corporate comms, which drafts a media holding statement. Hours later, employee comms realizes they need an internal memo. The next day, customer comms scrambles to respond to panicked users, while IR fields calls from analysts. The narrative is fractured, reactive and slow.

In a workflow model, a central “crisis COE” activates immediately. A cross-functional pod comprising leads from media, employee, customer, IR and legal convenes. It develops one unified core narrative. From that single source of truth, the IR lead adapts the message for the Street, the employee lead pushes guidance to managers and the digital team monitors real-time customer sentiment to adjust the external tone. The work happens concurrently, not sequentially. The enterprise speaks with one voice, at the speed of the crisis.

For a CCO, leadership in this context is less about owning the message and more about owning the process by which the message gets made. It requires knowing which colleagues to bring in before a decision is made and how to keep the work advancing without roadblocks or confusion. The skill required is as much coordination as it is traditional communications.

The communications leaders I know who have made this transition share a few common traits. For one, they’ve stopped policing ownership, writing rules of engagement that say, plainly: We consult before we act, we escalate when we’re stuck, we move together and we share a common vision. For two, they’ve accepted certain bare-faced truths about the workflow model: Shared responsibility is often uncomfortable, and gray areas are real, but these are part of the process. Three, they don’t fear healthy tension: In a workflow setting, functions are forced to collaborate and challenge one another, ultimately leading to a more successful outcome.

Some CCOs have pushed back when I’ve proposed this model, saying they don’t have direct oversight over all contributors. For example, many don’t directly manage public affairs or IR, and giving up control feels like a liability. But if I’ve learned one thing in my work helping dozens of these leaders navigate the new normal, it’s that influence without authority is, in fact, the job.

Done well, a modern communications function sits at the intersection of every major decision a company makes: strategy, reputation, culture, crisis and workforce. It should be designed for horizontal coordination, not vertical control. 

The silo model made sense when communications was simply a support function. It doesn’t work in the modern information era, and it certainly doesn’t work in an era where the challenges companies face in the external environment are wide-ranging and unpredictable. 

Most org charts haven’t gotten that memo yet. It’s time to hand the job to a process, not just a department.

Ben Kalevitch is a Managing Director of United Minds.

This article was originally published by PR Week.

Artificial intelligence has become the most productive “employee” in the building. Leaders who create durable advantage will be those who know exactly what must stay human.  

In offices across America, AI has proudly become the most productive “hire” on the team. Hotel groups are testing AI concierges. Utilities are deploying bots to negotiate payment plans with delinquent customers. Quick-service restaurants are rolling out AI to take drive‑thru orders and optimize staffing. Even school districts are using it to draft communications to parents.  

The default assumption: Automate as much as possible or get left behind. 

What’s missed in this interpretation is the sea of sameness that results. Strategy decks read the same way, often in Claude’s preferred Inter font. Customer interactions feel interchangeable, with AI’s cloying combinations of emojis and bullet points. Internal communications lose the texture that once made them distinctive.  

One of the colleges to which my daughter was accepted deployed an AI agent to call her. The AI agent was loaded with data and delivered the news in a human voice. Over time, it became clear from the questions it was asking that it was AI. My daughter hung up, feeling disconnected to a place she was supposed to be excited about joining.  

AI is, of course, a source of competitive advantage. Applied carelessly, it delivers non-competitive sameness. 

WHY HUMAN PREMIUM MATTERS 

As the marginal cost of producing technology-driven work approaches zero, the scarce resource inside organizations will not be intelligence or access to information. It will be the layer of human judgment, institutional memory, cultural instinct, and relational skill that technology cannot replicate. 

I call this the human premium. For many organizations, it will become their most durable moat. 

In most companies, the human premium shows up in two places. The first place it shows up is in relational work: the connective labor of serving customers, coaching teams, and building trust. Sociologist Allison Pugh describes this as recognizing, understanding, and responding to other people in ways that depend on empathy, spontaneity, and mutual recognition. 

The second place where human premium factors in is judgment work: It’s in the decisions leaders make under uncertainty, where context, ethics, and long-term consequences matter more than sheer processing power. This work involves the ability to see second-order effects on culture and reputation, and to preserve the instincts that make one company’s decisions consistently different from another’s. 

WHAT THIS LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE 

In relational work, the human premium sits in the frontline and day‑to‑day interactions where a company either feels human or doesn’t. A customer service agent bends a policy because they understand the relationship at stake. A barista remembers your name every morning and asks about the thing you were nervous about last week.  

In judgment work, it’s the ability to see beyond what the dashboard recommends—to read the room behind the numbers, invite dissent, and make calls that protect long-term cultural health instead of just short-term output. 

We intuitively see the difference in companies that feel distinct despite using the same tools as everyone else. What made Apple feel like Apple or Pixar feel like Pixar was not better data. It was cultural instincts, creative standards, and ways of working that no benchmark could fully specify. Culture is the immune system of the organization. You can automate the organs, the systems, and the financial models, but without a functioning immune system, the place stops thriving. 

We have evidence for how powerful this can be at scale. When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he launched a cultural reset centered on listening, empathy, and coaching. Analysts have linked that cultural shift to Microsoft’s ability to move faster on major platform bets and grow its market cap several times over.  

HOW TO CODIFY HUMAN PREMIUM AS A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE 

Human premium doesn’t survive via platitudes of “our people being our greatest asset.” It survives and thrives on deliberate design. Leaders who want to protect it can start with three moves: 

Over time, new categories of employment may emerge around this human premium. As economist Alex Imas has argued, we are likely to see jobs where humanity itself is the scarce product, and the core value is not the output but the quality of connection and discernment surrounding it. 

AI will keep getting faster and cheaper—and so will anything it can standardize. The remaining differentiators will be the judgment to know which decisions, relationships, and moments of connection must stay irreducibly human—and the discipline to protect them. 

Kate Bullinger is the CEO of United Minds.  

This article was originally published by Fast Company.  

Talk to any leader today and you’ll hear a variation of the same story: they are caught in ‘The Squeeze’. 

Expectations to deliver are higher than ever, resources feel stretched, and the pace of change is relentless. Leaders are being asked to navigate a world that feels increasingly unpredictable, where traditional management playbooks just aren’t enough any longer. 

When everything around you is shifting, the most critical capability a leader needs is a very human skill: resilience. 

Being a resilient leader today isn’t about gritting your teeth and getting through it, enduring high stress for short periods, and then “bouncing back” after a challenging phase. That traditional definition assumes you have the luxury of recovery time to reflect after a setback. 

Resilience today is about operating when recurrent setbacks are the norm, when constant shifts outside your control ask you to pivot and reprioritise what’s inside your control, and when learning and improvements take place in the moment, not at the post-action review meeting.  

Resilience is the foundation for leading through ‘The Squeeze’ and leading effectively when the pressure is on. And we know it’s always on. 

Leaders with high levels of resilience can do three things well: 

Building leadership resilience: an inside-out approach 

So, how do we build leadership resilience? It doesn’t happen through a single workshop or one-time moment. It takes a holistic approach – starting with the individual and expanding out to the environment they work in – and it happens over time.  

At United Minds, we break it into three parts: 

  1. Mindset (how we think) 
    First we have to acknowledge the intense pressures leaders are facing and validate the emotional reactions that leading through change brings. Leadership today is like a balancing act where we are forever walking a tightrope of change and uncertainty:  performing against today’s targets whilst also driving transformation for tomorrow; delivering at speed whilst also bring a team with you; alleviating anxiety, fear and uncertainty whilst also embracing change and agility.  

It means that understanding yourself as a person and who you are as a leader is more important than ever. To build a resilient mindset you must first know your own triggers and what motivates you so that you can adapt and progress quicker.  

It’s about choosing a positive, growth mindset and building the daily, healthy habits that allow you to live up to that attitude and handle whatever comes your way. 

We work with leaders to help them develop self-awareness and shift their mindset so they feel enabled and accountable. 

In our Leadership Shadow work, we spend time with leaders on understanding who we are as people and when we feel our most resilient – when we feel confident, performing and safe. We explore the impact our leadership has on others not just in the big moments, but in the everyday little moments too.  

  1. Capabilities (what we do) 


Next, leaders need practical tools. This means developing self-coaching habits that they can use to guide themselves through difficult moments. It could be using personal resilience assessments and coaching tools as resources that help identify the challenges and coping strategies. Whether it’s deliberately choosing what sticks (Velcro) and what bounces off (Teflon) or prioritising the concerns you can influence and control (Covey’s Spheres), we bring memorable analogies and frameworks that help leaders cope in the moment.  

Just as importantly as the tools themselves, we create safe opportunities to practise and embed these skills in the real world, so they become second nature. Buddy schemes, peer coaching or accountability circles provide ongoing support that allow for practising techniques over time, and continuing to learn and adjust.  

In our work with senior leader Talent Pools, we have developed a suite of tools to help people practise building their capability to manage personal resilience. We find these sessions not only help the leaders in the room, but also provide the toolbox for them to take to their teams and build resilience across the organisation.  

  1. Context (Where we work) 


Finally, the work environment leaders are operating in has to support these behaviours. If an organisation expects leaders to be resilient, the culture has to recognise and reward both resilience, and also a willingness to experiment, to fail and to learn.  

The expectations set by the business, and the behaviours modelled by senior leadership, must actively promote a healthy, resilient workplace, or else the leadership development and individual coaching falls flat.  This means championing a culture of experimentation; rewarding and recognising resilience as well as what people deliver; and creating a workplace where speaking up is safe and leaders lead with empathy. 

We run Convention Busting workshops with leaders and teams where we seek to break existing norms, ways of thinking and behaviours that have become conventional. Providing this space sets a leadership expectation to be taken back to the day-to-day and fuels resilience as part of the culture. 

How United Minds builds resilient leaders 

At United Minds, we help leaders turn resilience from a buzzword into their daily reality. We partner with organisations to build this leadership capability across all three areas: 

We are excited to be offering our ‘Leadership Resilience through the Squeeze’ masterclass series – a programme of development sessions for leaders that cover mindset, capabilities and context, and can be tailored for the needs of your organisation. We cover topics including: 

 
Want to learn more and share ideas about leadership resilience? Get in touch, we love to chat.

A few months ago, we spoke anonymously with European corporate affairs leaders from major global corporation about their evolving roles, responsibilities and challenges. Our interviews revealed that, like the secret star of a rally team, the modern Chief Communications Officer (CCO) carries the immense responsibility of foresight and guidance without ever holding the steering wheel. More than just a strategic co-driver translating a complex world into actionable “pace notes,” the modern CCO is focused on building trust and engagement with stakeholders. By influencing the actions and commitments required to move the business forward, they ensure  the CEO can drive with both speed and confidence.

Successfully steering through this requires a new level of partnership and strategic input, and while the role of corporate affairs continues its trajectory from reactive support function to strategic business partner, many European CCOs still find themselves battling outdated perceptions of their function as a mere cost center.

Our report contributors shared their experience of managing three critical balancing acts:

Download the report and find out how United Minds can help your Corporate Communications function deliver trust, insight and direction organisations need to win the race.

As 2025 closed, many organizations were grappling with what we identified as the Automation–Talent Tension: heavy investment in AI alongside growing uncertainty about the future of human roles. Three months later, the picture is clearer. Across industries, the organizations pulling ahead are those treating AI not as a replacement for people, but as a multiplier of human judgment, expertise and skill.

This quarter marked a decisive shift from automation-first thinking toward collaboration-driven performance. While AI tools are now widespread, outcomes vary dramatically based on how work is redesigned, how talent is developed and how leadership integrates technology into operating models and growth strategies. The greatest advantage is emerging at the intersection of advanced technology and distinctly human capability.

This report examines that shift across three fronts — how work gets done, how companies grow and how the physical world supports the digital one — and outlines five concrete actions leaders can take now to convert AI potential into sustained business value.

The Defining Tensions Shaping Enterprise AI Transformation

The conversation around AI is evolving. While skeptics point to mixed returns, a growing group of organizations is moving beyond the hype to uncover what truly drives impact.

A 2025 Teneo survey of more than 350 public company CEOs found that 68% plan to increase AI investment in 2026—even though fewer than half of current projects have delivered returns that exceed their costs.

Rather than focus on the cynics, we set out to understand what’s behind the success stories. Through interviews with AI and digital leaders across global enterprises in pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, transportation, consumer goods, and packaging, one truth became clear: the challenge isn’t technology—it’s people.

AI adoption is a human transformation wrapped in a technical one, and the organizations that navigate its inherent tensions achieve 1.5x revenue growth and 1.6x higher shareholder returns. This report explores how leading companies are capturing value and offers guidance to help you chart your own path.

Q4 2025 marked another pivotal shift in the AI landscape. The quarter was defined not only by unprecedented technological breakthroughs, but also by the growing organizational, cultural and governance pressures that accompany rapid adoption. As frontier models accelerated in capability and global competition intensified, leaders faced mounting expectations to translate technological momentum into measurable business value. Yet this quarter also surfaced a sharper realism: scaling AI requires more than investment in tools. It demands clarity, coordination, workforce readiness and a trusted operating environment. ​

This report outlines five key takeaways for executives and three signals to watch heading into Q1 2026, supported by practical recommendations.

For leaders managing change today – which is all leaders – the job can more often feel like being a pilot flying through a thunderstorm. While trying to build a plane.  

It requires navigating a relentless mix of challenges: economic pressure and hiring freezes. Political instability and global uncertainty. Constant restructuring and transformation fatigue. And of course, the rapid proliferation of AI technology. 

And through it all, the message from the top is often the same: Do more with less. And, also: yesterday. 

This isn’t just a tough quarter, it’s a new normal. The pace is unrelenting, the stakes are high, and the path forward is rarely clear. Teams are expected to move fast, stay resilient, and somehow remain inspired while the ground shifts beneath them. 

Welcome to The Squeeze, where uncertainty and speed collide, and traditional change management starts to fall apart. 

Why the Old Playbook Doesn’t Work Anymore 

Most change models were built for a world that moved slower and made more sense. They assume you can map out a neat journey from “current state” to “future state,” with clear milestones and predictable outcomes. 

But today’s reality is messier. Change is emotional, nonlinear, and deeply human. Leaders are making decisions with incomplete information, while their teams are still recovering from the last three transformations. 

As one executive put it: “In a world where uncertainty is the only certainty, we’re still using change management like it’s a roadmap for a terrain that never shifts.” 

Not All Change is Created Equal: Four Scenarios, Four Strategies 

If change is messy, then the way we manage it should be flexible. Borrowing from high-stakes, mission critical environments such as space travel, it’s more important than ever to have a defined destination in mind, and be adaptable long the way. Not every mission – or transformation – moves at the same pace or carries the same level of uncertainty, so why treat them all the same?  

Picture a matrix with two axes: Speed of change vs. Level of uncertainty. 

Depending on where your initiative lands, you’ll need a different set of tools, priorities, and leadership behaviors. Here’s how that plays out across four common scenarios: 

1. Real-Time Disruption (High Speed, High Uncertainty) 

Think: AI adoption, crisis response. You’re building the plane mid-flight. Focus on piloting change, coaching in the moment, and engaging key employee groups. 

Example: To drive gen AI adoption a global pharma company ditched the traditional From > To approach and focused on fostering a growth mindset using immersive gamified learning —resulting in a 63% increase in engagement. 

2. Strategic Market Moves (Low Speed, High Uncertainty) 

Think: M&A, long-term strategic shifts. Here, resilience is key. Help teams manage uncertainty fatigue, stay grounded in the present, and build hope for the future. 

Example: A luxury retailer launching a new strategy and transformation overcame employee uncertainty and built leader accountability by creating space for emotional processing, leadership development, and community problem-solving, contributing to a rise in share price. 

3. Operating Pivots (High Speed, Low Uncertainty) 

Think: targeted org changes with clear direction. Use change sprints and rapid communication. Park the long-term plan until you’ve gathered feedback. 

Example: A pharma medical team that needed to make change happen fast focused on the initial plan and cascade as a ‘sprint’ and used employee feedback to shape the ongoing change and communications plan, enabling real-time responsiveness and agility. 

4. Enterprise Rollouts (Low Speed, Low Uncertainty) 

Think: system implementations, process changes. These are more predictable and benefit from traditional change management approaches focused on coordination and alignment. 

Example: A professional services company leveraged a traditional multi-phased approach to roll-out an enterprise business strategy, improving understanding of the shift and future expectations by team and region. 

Understanding the type of change you’re facing goes beyond strategic exercise to leadership imperative. When you match your approach to the nature of the transformation, you reduce friction, build trust, and increase the odds of success. 

What’s Next for Change Leaders? 

The world isn’t getting simpler. AI will keep evolving. Markets will keep shifting. And teams will keep looking to their leaders for clarity in the chaos. 

You can keep hoping for a clean, linear roadmap, or you can embrace the mess and lead with agility, empathy, and impact.  

As Astronaut Sunita Williams said: ‘adaptability is essential for survival and success.’ 

At United Minds, we’re building tools that help leaders thrive in uncertainty—not despite it, but because of it. 

Organizations that do it right can compress what might take years into months.

Every technological revolution has its awkward adolescence. We’re living through AI’s right now. Recent research from Stanford and BetterUp has given this moment a name: “workslop.” It’s the flood of hastily AI-generated content that clogs inboxes, clutters presentations, and quietly erodes productivity. The email that reads like it was written by a committee of robots. The strategy document with oddly formal phrasing and zero original insight. The presentation deck that says nothing new.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not imagining it. And if you’re a manager watching your team’s output simultaneously increase in volume and decrease in quality, you’re not alone.

But here’s what history teaches us: this phase is predictable, necessary, and temporary. The question isn’t whether we’ll move through it. It’s how quickly we can get to the other side.

WHY WORKSLOP HAPPENS

When personal computers arrived in offices, workers treated them as expensive typewriters. When the internet became ubiquitous, we spent years learning that you can walk 10 feet to talk to someone instead of firing off another email. Each time, we mistook the tool for the solution.

We’re making the same mistake with AI. Only faster, and at greater scale.

The core problem is one of delegation versus collaboration. AI will deliver increased speed and efficiency, but most organizations have accidentally encouraged their people to treat it as something to offload to rather than something to work with. An associate generates a client memo with Claude and sends it along, complete with the telltale “AI can make mistakes, please double-check” footer still attached. A manager asks ChatGPT to write a strategy document and forwards it without adding context, nuance, or judgment.

This isn’t a technology problem. It’s a mindset problem that technology has exposed.

When content creation becomes effortless, the cognitive work of thinking deeply becomes optional. And when it becomes optional, people can opt out. What researchers are calling “cognitive atrophy” is really just a gradual disconnection from the thinking process itself. We’re delegating not just the execution, but the strategy. AI will get you 70% of the way there, but someone still needs to own that final 30%, and right now it seems some people are checking out before the finish line.

THE WAY THROUGH

The good news? Workslop isn’t a crisis. It’s a phase. Organizations that recognize it as such can compress what might take years into months.

Start by redefining what you measure. The drive to do more with less can create pressure to crank out more work in the same time, with AI as the productivity multiplier. But leaders need to resist the assumption that one person plus AI should equal twice the output. If you’re still evaluating employees primarily on volume, you’re incentivizing exactly the behavior you don’t want. Prose and code generation are now commoditized. What matters is the quality of thinking that directs these tools. In your performance management processes, assess people on their judgment, their ability to steer AI effectively, and their capacity to iterate toward genuinely excellent outcomes.

Draw bright lines. Leaders need to align on the AI vision, the guardrails, and how they’ll hold people accountable. Establish explicit standards for what constitutes acceptable AI-assisted work. Some organizations are implementing simple rules: AI-generated content must be marked during internal review. Client-facing materials must demonstrate clear human value-add. Any work bearing AI watermarks or disclaimers gets automatically returned. These aren’t punitive measures. They’re cultural signals about what professionalism means in an AI-augmented workplace. Without mutual commitment from leaders to embed these standards, the bright lines blur.

Embrace experimentation, but guide it.  The workslop phase exists because people need room to learn, and that requires a growth mindset, not a fixed one. Risk aversion kills experimentation. Moving through this phase means reframing failure as data, celebrating what you learn from missteps, and managers modeling vulnerability about their own learning curve. Managers can accelerate this shift by tapping into people’s intrinsic motivation for mastery. But experimentation without feedback loops doesn’t create change. So have forums where teams share what’s working and what isn’t, and celebrate the wins and the learnings of human-AI collaboration.

Learn from unexpected sources. Universities faced the workslop crisis before corporations did. Many have developed sophisticated approaches to maintaining rigor while embracing AI tools. They’ve created assignments that inherently require human judgment, implemented systems that flag low-quality automated work, and redesigned evaluation criteria to emphasize critical thinking over production. These aren’t perfect solutions, but they’re battle-tested ones that can translate to corporate contexts.

Resist the delegation instinct. The most important cultural shift is also the simplest: don’t treat AI as your copilot. Treat it like a student, and you’re the teacher. This reframes the entire relationship. You’re not handing off work. You’re responsible for what that student produces, which means staying engaged in the iterative process, using tools to enhance rather than replace human judgment, and taking full ownership of outputs regardless of how they were generated. Organizations that successfully embed this mindset move through the workslop phase measurably faster. The upside? New Stanford research tells us that employees trust AI more when they can see it as a collaborator, not a closed system.

AN UNEXPECTED OPPORTUNITY

Here’s what makes this moment genuinely unique: the traditional corporate hierarchy of expertise has temporarily inverted. Right now, a brilliant 22-year-old who knows how to work with AI tools can create more value than their manager who doesn’t. This isn’t a threat to experienced leaders. It’s an opportunity. Junior employees have rare insight into what actually works, and smart managers are creating channels for those employees to lead the way forward. You’re not being replaced. You’re being offered a shortcut to expertise that would otherwise take years to develop.

The companies that emerge strongest from the workslop phase won’t be those that restricted AI use or pretended the problems didn’t exist. They’ll be the ones that acknowledged the awkwardness, called it out, learned from it quickly, and built cultures where humans and AI genuinely complement each other.  Experience shows us that the most critical cultural factors that will shape the success of AI include the degree of autonomy of teams to shape workflows, the measures and controls put in place, and what gets rewarded and recognized.

We’re in the messy middle of the AI adoption curve. Workslop is almost certainly happening in your organization right now. The only question is whether you’re managing the transition or hoping it resolves itself.

History suggests which approach works better.

This article was originally published by Fast Company.

Q3 2025 Insights

This past quarter, generative AI accelerated its integration into business and society. Companies moved from pilots to enterprise-wide adoption, regulators began stepping up oversight and the workforce experienced rapid disruption. Those shifts were mirrored in the media: the tone moved from wide-eyed optimism to pragmatic consideration, so while coverage volume remained high, it increasingly scrutinized how AI should be used rather than if it should be used. These shifts underscore the need for leaders to:

This report outlines five key takeaways for executives and three signals to watch heading into Q4 2025, supported by practical recommendations.