How to Help People Thrive with AI

2026-07-13 · Source: The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News · Field: Business & Management — Human Resources & Workforce Development, Operations & Process Management, Corporate Strategy & Leadership · Depth: Intermediate, extended

Summary

A recent analysis highlights significant challenges in AI adoption, with Section's AI proficiency report revealing that while 69% of organizations have acted on AI agents, only 16% of workers use them, and less than 10% can define them, partly due to limited training. Research indicates AI adoption often increases work intensity, leading to "AI brain fry," with early adopters' email and messaging use more than doubling, and focused work falling by 9%. David Brooks identifies three archetypes for thriving with AI: "Productive Passengers" (low cognitive effort), "Reluctant Optimizers" (medium effort, risk of over-reliance), and "Mental Marathoners" (high effort, seek to expand capabilities). The article advocates using AI to achieve previously impossible tasks, not just for efficiency. Uber's "agentic pods" initiative exemplifies this, pairing AI-proficient engineers with domain experts for two-week sprints to redesign workflows, achieving dramatic productivity gains like reducing financial pacing reports from two days to 10 minutes, emphasizing deep workflow transformation.

Key takeaway

For Directors of AI/ML or Operations Professionals aiming to maximize AI's impact, recognize that true value comes from fundamentally redesigning workflows, not merely automating tasks. Your teams should prioritize using AI to enable new capabilities and stretch human potential, rather than just boosting efficiency. Consider implementing "agentic pods" or similar embedded programs, pairing AI experts with business domain specialists to collaboratively uncover and build solutions for previously impossible or deeply entrenched challenges, ensuring AI enhances human agency and drives transformative change.

Key insights

Thriving with AI requires cultivating mental effort and using AI to achieve new, previously impossible capabilities.

Principles

• Volition becomes valuable when intelligence is plentiful.
• Focus AI on expanding capabilities, not just efficiency.
• Redesign entire workflows, not just automate tasks.

Method

Uber's "agentic pods" pair AI-proficient engineers with domain experts for two-week sprints to shadow, prioritize, build, and validate AI agents for workflow redesign.

In practice

• Challenge AI with your analysis, don't outsource thinking.
• Prioritize AI for new capabilities, not just rote tasks.
• Embed AI engineers with business experts for workflow redesign.

Topics

• AI Adoption
• AI Agents
• Workflow Redesign
• Human-AI Collaboration
• Cognitive Effort
• Organizational AI Strategy

Best for: Executive, Director of AI/ML, Consultant, Operations Professional

Related on AIssential

• How to Help People Thrive with AI — AI's true value lies in expanding human capabilities and enabling new work, not just automating existing tasks.
• AI Won’t Replace You — But Someone Using AI Might — The real competition is between people who use AI and those who ignore it, as AI augments human potential.
• Everyone’s using AI. Almost nobody’s actually winning with it. — Widespread AI adoption yields little business impact because most companies fail to redesign workflows around AI capabilities.
• Redesign Work Before You Add More AI Agents — AI value is realized by redesigning workflows to integrate human-agent systems, not merely by adding more AI tools.
• I Thought I Thought AI Would Replace Me. Instead, It Made Me More Valuable. — Adapting to AI through consistent learning and effective prompting transforms it from a threat into a valuable productivity partner.
• To Thrive Alongside AI, Focus on Mindset—Not Skillset — Thriving with AI requires a mindset shift from task execution to supervising agents, prioritizing human judgment.

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Editorial summary, takeaway, and curation by AIssential. Original article published by The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News.