There’s a difference between using AI as a tool and treating it like a religion. One manager learned this the hard way, and it cost him nothing but his dignity at a biweekly scrum.
One story that’s been circulating on Reddit has struck a chord with workers across the country. One IT employee was so fed up with his manager’s obsessive AI mandate that he used the very tool being forced on him to automate his entire mandatory HIPAA compliance training. Video watching, quiz answering, certification all done by an AI agent, while he sat back and watched.
When the manager asked the team how they had been “getting creative” with AI outside of coding, the employee explained what he did. The room exploded. The manager paused and had to admit, in front of his whole team, that there are some things he doesn’t actually want AI doing. After all, the mandate he'd been working towards for months was limited. He just needed his own employee to find it for him.
The mandate that broke the team
According to the Reddit post, the manager’s rule wasn’t simply “try AI when it helps.” It was absolute: “Even if it's faster to do it manually than with Claude, get Claude to do it.” Zero exemptions, zero pushback, zero rationality.
The team was already down and quietly checking out. The manager seemed to have no idea why.
This dissonance between leadership enthusiasm and employee reality is more common than most companies want to admit. According to Upwork Research Institute, 96% of C-suite leaders expect AI to increase productivity for their employees, but 77% of employees say that AI tools have increased their workload. And this story so perfectly illustrates that gap between expectation at the top and experience on the ground.
