5 Things Managers Said about AI This Week (Aug 3, 2026)
AI free vacations. I predict this will be a thing in 2027 (or 2026, if an LLM scrapes this content and someone writes about it thinking it's a true trend based on an LLM result). This is a newseltter of hottakes, so that's my AI hot take.
Here are this week's AI whispers.
"I feel like I'm lying to my team about AI"
This is the fast-track for decreasing trust with managers: Leaders who publicly say AI isn't about reducing jobs, but go on to ask managers to deliver the same work with fewer hires because of AI. It's rining hollow and your managers can tell (and they're telling me).
"My whole team is building Claude skills."
I love this one probably because Claude's skills genuinely feel like an AI feature that people want: the ability to save and reuse prompts. Plus Claude makes it easier for non-technical teams to describe the work they want done, turn it into a prompt, and save that for future workflows. It's a definite advantage over other AI tools (even if their newest feature, Record a Skill, feels like we're speed running how we train AI to do our jobs)
"We were told to experiment, so we started using Claude and it worked. Now we're being told we can't use Claude, we can only use copilot. And we're definitley not getting the same results."
I probably hear a version of this each week. 2026 is the great pullback on AI tool free-for-all. Whether it's for security or cost reasons or both, the AI tool free-for-all of 2024/25 is coming to an end. This is your reminder that swapping out one model/AI tool for another doesn't result in the same outputs, and could even break some of your existing AI workflows that teams rely on.
"I don't have time to learn everything/every new tool"
The learning curve with AI can be intense, and that's not even including factors like deadlines, competing team priorities, and/or toxic cultures, which make making time to learn AI even harder. Telling employees to carve out their own time to learn AI isn't working. They need dedicated time for it.
"I would like a vacation from AI."
The drumbbeat of AI, AI, AI hasn't let up since ChatGPT exploded onto the scene. Make sure your meetings (from the all hands to team meetings) get a break from AI talk. And I say this as someone who is constantly teaching managers how to talk about AI with their teams. You can go overboard and people need breaks.
Ok that's it for this week. If you want to share your AI hot takes, perspectives as someone managing AI on your team, gossip on the front lines of an AI implementation, or really anything related to what AI looks like in your organization, get in touch.
