The Quick and the 'Dead': When AI Buzzwords Kill Common Sense

Every week there's a new headline declaring something "dead" — email marketing, middle management, critical thinking — while simultaneously promising that some new AI acronym will save your organization. Agentic swarm coding, anyone?

George Carlin had a word for this. Actually, he had several. But the most useful one was bullshit.

The Hype Cycle Is the Problem, Not AI

The real danger isn't artificial intelligence. It's the intellectual laziness that comes with treating buzzwords as strategy. When a leadership team starts using "agentic" and "LLM orchestration" in slide decks without knowing what those things do, you have a change management problem — not a technology problem.

In my own work, I've automated roughly 90% of routine customer support using tools like Make.com and Zapier. Nothing exotic. No multi-agent swarms. Just boring, reliable automation built incrementally. The 10% that's left? That's where humans still matter — judgment calls, emotional nuance, relationship context.

Robot + People. Not Robot OR People.

Every serious AI implementation I've seen that actually works follows the same model: Robot + People, with fewer people doing low-value tasks. Every serious failure follows a different model: someone decided humans were the bottleneck and removed them entirely.

Removing humans completely from any consequential process isn't efficiency — it's organizational recklessness. Real guardrails aren't just a technology configuration. They're a design choice that requires humans to set, monitor, and adjust them.

What Actually Works

Here's the unsexy truth about AI in change management and organizational work:

• Start with the hammer. Pick one tool. Use it badly. Learn what it actually does before theorizing about what it could do.
• Context beats prompts. The single biggest improvement in AI output quality isn't a better prompt — it's richer context about who you are, what you're trying to do, and what "good" looks like.
• Automation is a change initiative. Any AI implementation that doesn't account for how people will actually respond to it isn't an AI strategy — it's a surprise reorganization.
• Ignore the fear-mongers, but audit your guardrails. Fear-based AI discourse is as useless as hype-based AI discourse. Set real constraints, review them quarterly, and adjust based on what you observe.

Three AI Tools Write a George Carlin Closing

To close this post, I gave three different AI tools the same brief: write a George Carlin-style sign-off about AI hype. The results were instructive — polished, punchy, and completely safe. Carlin was never safe. My actual ending is better than all of them, because I wrote it after spending six months whacking things with a hammer to see what they do.

That's the method. It's not glamorous. It doesn't have a name yet. But it works.

AI for change agents isn't about replacing your methodology — it's about extending your capacity to listen, sense, and respond faster. That's always been what good change practice looks like.