If you Google, "Do we even need AI," Google's AI will assure you that we do. Oh, absolutely! It can improve scientific research and save lives. Um, yeah. So you say. Then why is it writing emails or generating PowerPoints? Why is it languishing in the customer service pipeline? Why is it infiltrating all forms of office communication?

And why does it insist on chatting with me? Shouldn't it be busy curing cancer?

I realize it's too late to stop AI, and we really have no clue just how terrible or fantastic the consequences will be. It's the code equivalent of fire. So probably a bit of both.

But, honestly, I don't want to talk to my PDF documents or ask my car questions. I don't want my refrigerator to recommend healthy meals based on a review of the half pint of ice cream, greek yogurt, and Sauvignon Blanc it finds inside.

Our current – quiet – relationship status is working just fine. I do not want to change it. Inevitability is the word that always pops up next. There's no escaping it, so resistance is futile. Maybe. Maybe not.

Consent is something AI tends to overlook.

So before we turn over everything to AI, maybe we should start by asking, "if we just stop doing all the things we hate to do, do we even need AI in the office?"

If you are too busy to write a hundred emails, and everyone else is too short on time to read 100 emails, the answer may not be an AI plugin that generates 100 emails per minute and another AI tool to summarize that plague of messages.

Stop sending emails. Because TL:DR will be replaced with AI:DR in about a week.

Consider sending actual human written emails only when absolutely necessary, and only to the people who need to be looped in. One email will be read. One may be all you need.

Instead of paying for a suite of AI services to plan, schedule, brainstorm, bullet point, review, document and regurgitate meetings – just stop meeting. What started out as one or two monthly meetings back in my corporate years, quickly metastasized to entire days and weeks spent moving from one chair to another in over air conditioned conference rooms.

Nothing of consequence or import ever became of any of those meetings. In fact, 99% of the companies involved don't even exist today.

No one who attends meetings likes meetings.

Imagine an office where everyone assumes that Friday mornings are open from 9-11am for any meeting that needs to take place. A quick notification and tally during the week will reveal availability, and if there are enough takers? You meet or postpone a week. If you can resolve the issue without a meeting, even better. If no one needs to meet, Friday work ends at 11am. Go home. Have fun. Reclaim your lives.

Just imagine.

Limit your ubiquitous corporate detritus to one thing a month from one person – chosen by an impartial group to select the most informationally worthy selection. This month we're all looking at Taylor's PowerPoint about replacing our current coffee vendor with a diverse selection that would rotate quarterly – at no additional expense!

Thanks to all who submitted, and better luck next month. PowerPoint is open for discussion Friday morning at 9:30am, with free coffee and pastry samples!

See what I did there? That's management, baby.

This also frees up AI to coordinate drone-based ocean search-and-rescues, solve cold case files, process millions of bits of traffic data to reduce gridlock, assess and create a country-wide game plan for updating America's infrastructure for maximizing water distribution between flood zones and drought zones.

In the meantime, I'm willing to write my own poetry...

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.