AI tools make it harder for leaders and teams to judge an individual’s abilities. Are personal and organizational capabilities silently crumbling in your company?
Reading Time: 12 min
Topics
PPaint/Ikon Images
Summary:
Leaders used to judge people’s skills by their work outputs (among other factors). But now, generative AI tools can create fairly polished outputs for anyone — and an individual’s skill set can waste away. When team members can’t accurately evaluate each other’s skills, it damages team trust. Here’s how to spot the signs of trouble and make sure that your people and organization are as capable as they appear.
Dry rot. A Potemkin village. The Wizard of Oz.
What do those things have in common? In each case, they may look good on the surface, but it’s only an illusion. Wood afflicted with dry rot looks just fine until the tree it’s in topples down. Grigory Potemkin is said to have tried to impress Catherine the Great by creating a prosperous Crimean village constructed only of building facades, masking the real town’s crippling poverty. The Wizard of Oz looked great and powerful, until the cowering man behind the curtain was revealed.
Could artificial intelligence do the same to organizations — create an impressive, seamless exterior even as capability completely falls apart inside?
This alarming possibility was raised by the AI experts we interviewed for a joint Anthrome Insight-Axialent study on AI’s impact on behavior and culture inside organizations. Even as those experts uniformly cited AI’s potential to transform work for the better, they cautioned that AI adoption risks unintentionally creating an organizational mirage: workplaces that appear highly capable while people’s real skills quietly erode beneath polished AI-generated output.
Perhaps even more worrisome: When we can no longer reliably tell who truly knows what, the interpersonal trust that teams depend on to function also crumbles.
What are the early signs that the mirage effect is already forming in your organization — and what does it look like when it takes hold? How can leaders avoid the mirage effect and make sure that in the AI age, their people and organizations are as capable as they appear?
Capability Mirages: The Early Signs and Troubling Possibilities
An AI-driven illusion of competence, hiding the absence of genuine understanding, is already appearing in some organizations, the AI experts told us. Stephanie Antonian, founder and CEO of AI product development company Aestora, explained how this can play out in dangerous ways for leaders and organizations: “The upside [of AI tools] is that everyone can produce a level of work that’s pretty good for basic tasks. … It looks pretty good. But then you don’t know what’s underneath it, how resilient that piece of work is, or whether it’s going to give you an additional liability.”
After all, AI is not necessarily an improver of work but, rather, an amplifier.