Stop Automating Your Dysfunction
Everyone wants an AI Agent
It is the new toy. You want one to schedule your meetings. You want one to answer your emails. You want one to handle your Jira tickets.
We are entering the era of “Agent Bloat.” And it is going to cost you a fortune.
Here is a story you have seen before.
Meet Dave. Dave is a Senior Engineer. Dave hates doing expense reports. So, Dave spent his entire weekend building a custom AI agent. He hooked it up to three different APIs. He wrote a Python script to scan his receipts. He trained it to know the difference between a client dinner and a team lunch.
It took him 20 hours.
Now, Dave never has to file an expense report again. He demos it to the team. Everyone claps. You might even be tempted to give Dave a bonus for being “innovative.”
Don’t.
Dave didn’t solve a problem. Dave automated a symptom.
The Rot Under the Floorboards
Why did Dave spend 20 hours building a robot to do a task?
Because the task was painful.
If filing expenses took two clicks, Dave wouldn’t need an agent. He built the tool because your process is broken. The forms are too long. The categories are confusing. The receipt matching is slow.
Dave built a survival mechanism.
When you applaud the agent, you are ignoring the fire. You are letting a robot do work that shouldn’t be hard in the first place. This isn’t innovation. This is capitulation.
Agents Are Expensive Tape
An AI Agent is pure revenue burn when applied to a bad workflow.
You are paying for the compute. You are paying for the API calls. You are paying for the maintenance of the code.
But worst of all, you are cementing the bad process.
Once you build an agent to handle your terrible procurement process, you will never fix procurement. You have hidden the pain. The inefficiency is still there, rotting away at your company’s foundation. You just can’t see it anymore because a robot is clicking the buttons.
Subtract. Don’t Add.
This is where you come in.
It is fun to buy tools. It is fun to talk about “The Future of Work.”
It is not fun to fight HR about the expense policy. It is not fun to argue with Finance that we don’t need a receipt for a $5 coffee.
But that is the job.
Your team is drowning in red tape. They are begging for help. They don’t need a smarter Clippy to help them fill out forms. They need you to burn the forms.
If you need an AI agent to navigate your internal processes, you have failed. You built a maze so complex that only a machine can get through it.
Stop buying shields. Start killing the monsters.
The Monday Morning Fix
Audit the “Automators”: Look at the scripts and tools your engineers are building for themselves. If they are automating a specific internal process, that process is broken. Fix the process.
Ban “Band-Aid” Agents: If a vendor tries to sell you an agent to navigate your own confusing documentation, fire the vendor. Delete the confusing documentation.
The “Two-Click” Rule: Pick one administrative task this week. If it takes more than two clicks or five minutes, cut the requirements until it fits.
Participation Question What is the dumbest internal process at your company that people are trying to use AI to solve?
