🤖 AI Is Making You Worse at Your Job
AI is currently making most managers worse at their actual job. Why I am looking forward to the beautiful AI backlash in marketing. Plus: The one habit that protects your edge, now.
Hi 👋 I’m Florian Schleicher. This is the FutureStrategies newsletter. Thank you so much for reading along 💚
Okay, let’s take a deep breath.
I’ve been thinking a lot about AI in the last weeks.
And I am fucking bored of what I currently see.
Because one thing get’s left out in most discussions, videos, podcasts, speeches: If you work in marketing and have a lead role, your actual job is judgment, and judgment is the one input no current LLMs can supply.
The only thing AI really produces is just quantity out of mediocrity.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted on Linkedin that I would unfollow everyone who writes their postings with AI. It was my second most viewed post this year:
Some people then told me “You are just anti AI.”
I am not.
I use it daily in work and life. I run research studies with it, I draft with it, I use it to pressure-test arguments and critique me. I also use it to research vacations, find new recipes or find a new printer for my office.
But the closer I work with these tools, the clearer it becomes to me what they are doing to the people who lean on them.
Whenever we lean too much on something, we lose something.
And when the pendulum swings into one direction, it always swings back.
Now we have the first psychological data on what the over-reliance does to our capabilities, and the first cultural signs of where it goes next: the early glimpses of an AI-backlash that ends the day it stops being the story and simply becomes normal.
So today, let’s look at the risks of marketeers and brands using AI. At what skills you will need in this beautiful post-hype-future. Because when AI becomes normal, it becomes infrastructure, and infrastructure does not differentiate anyone.
1. What you’ve already noticed
Every keynote is now about AI.
Every podcast.
Every newsletter (including this one).
And then you close the laptop and most of the actual work looks the way it looked two years ago. The volume of the conversation and the size of the change in the average day have come apart:
The first sign is the feed: By the end of 2024 already more than half of long-form LinkedIn posts were AI-generated. Just in May 2026 Linkedin itself is now moving to limit the reach of AI-generated postings, and user fatigue and a demand for more human content are reshaping what gets seen. The posts all sound the same, the comments sound like the posts, and it is just fucking boring.
The second sign is young people: In May 2026 the graduating classes booed speakers who praised AI: Eric Schmidt at the University of Arizona, the University of Central Florida speaker who pitched it as the next industrial revolution, the one at Middle Tennessee State.
“Gen Z, despite being more familiar with AI, is the most pessimistic about jobs, with 81% saying that AI will decrease job opportunities. People are not rejecting AI, but people are asking questions now since the initial AI fever is gone.”
Chetan Jaiswal, Department of Computing at Quinnipiac
Even Pope Leo XIV used his first encyclical to call for AI to be “disarmed.” (This is especially interesting when we consider that religion has a little bit of a comeback - especially with young men).
The third sign is about your work: Brands have started to advertise the absence of AI as the product. Dove committed to never using AI to represent real women. Polaroid put billboards next to the Apple and Google offices reading “AI can’t generate sand between your toes.”
Aerie’s pledge to use real people only became its most-liked post in 2025. Meanwhile the AI-made ads, from Coca-Cola, Gucci to Toys R Us and LEGO got called soulless in public.
