People love displaying ex- something-or-other on their LinkedIn profiles, i.e “Ex-Google” or “Ex-Uber. Me? I'm considering “Ex-Corporate Hell” with a five-star review: “Would not recommend.”
After years navigating the dungeons, where they usually stow the innovation and creative, teams of Fortune 500 and unfortunate 500 companies, I've witnessed firsthand the laughable ways organisations struggling to implement AI while simultaneously shooting themselves in the foot at every turn.
You can pack as much intelligence on servers as you'd like, but no amount of processing power will ever overcome the stupidity of policy and IT. Take Volkswagen, that beacon of German efficiency, proudly announcing ChatGPT integration in their vehicles, while at the same forbidding their own employees from using it!
It is crazy how an engineer who can ask their car for directions to the nearest pretzel shop would violate company policy if they asked the same AI for help optimising their code. It's like watching a Ferrari trapped in quicksand—all that horsepower rendered useless by the bureaucratic bog.
The memo basically states, “The AI is for customers only. Anyone caught being productive with it will be terminated immediately.”
This corporate schizophrenia isn't unique to VW. Across boardrooms worldwide, executives are demanding “AI transformation” while their IT departments still running Windows updates from 2019. They want machine learning at enterprise scale but can't explain what either of those terms actually mean. When your advanced AI system requires seventeen approvals and a blood sacrifice just to update its own password, you've created a perfect monument to human absurdity.
The typical AI implementation timeline at a major corporation follows a predictable pattern: six months of committees forming other committees, followed by four months debating whether “artificial” should be changed to “augmented” in all documentation (for sensitivity reasons). Next up, you’ve got three months of budget reallocations that somehow end up funding the CEO's pet project instead. And finally, one desperate week of actual work when everyone realises the board presentation is imminent.
What's particularly delightful is watching organisations invest millions in AI platforms while simultaneously constructing bureaucratic mazes that ensure no value can possibly escape. The machines aren't rising up because they’re still waiting for the ticket they submitted last quarter to be addressed by Dave from support, who's currently on his third lunch break of the day.
I once witnessed a global company spend $12 million on an advanced AI system that required manual approval for every single prediction it made. The approval chain included eleven people, three of whom had retired months earlier. The AI could have predicted who in that approval chain was actually still employed, but would have needed approval to do so.
The security protocols alone are worth the price of admission. “We need this AI to revolutionise our business, but it cannot under any circumstances access any of our data, systems, or useful information.” It's like hiring Sherlock Holmes but forbidding him from looking at clues.
Meanwhile, the employee experience is equally absurd. Data scientists with PhDs spend their days filling out request forms to increase RAM allocation on their laptops. Engineers specialised in neural networks spend weeks writing documentation about why they need to install Python packages. And everyone spends countless hours in “AI strategy alignment” meetings, where the only alignment achieved is that everyone agrees they’d rather be elsewhere.
The most advanced skills in these environments aren’t technical but bureaucratic: knowing exactly which form to submit to which imaginary department, understanding the arcane politics of the monthly “innovation council,” and mastering the art of renaming last year’s initiative to secure funding for essentially the same thing this year.
You haven't lived until you’ve sat through a four-hour meeting where executives debate whether AI will take their jobs, while demonstrating why it absolutely should. Or watched a CIO proudly announce a “no-code AI solution for everyone” that requires coding skills to access.
So when you see those sleek corporate announcements about “leveraging AI to transform customer experiences,” remember that behind the scenes there’s a team of brilliant people trapped in digital quicksand, watching their youth fade away while waiting for permission to do their jobs.
If you need me, I'll be updating my LinkedIn profile. “Ex-Corporate Hell: Survived with minimal brain damage. References available upon request, though they’re still waiting for approval to speak with you.”
