AI won't take the humanity out of work. It might put it there for the first time.

In a meeting the other day, someone asked whether we should worry about AI taking the humanity out of work.

Honestly? Have you looked at what we ask people to do all day?

The very expensive, very bored API

Here's a fairly normal day in a lot of jobs.

Copy the order from the email into the finance system. Copy the new starter's details into four different tools. Chase everyone for their timesheets, then type them into payroll. Pull numbers out of three reports to build the one the board actually reads. Take the form someone filled in, paste it into a spreadsheet, retype it into another system, then email it to the next person so they can do the same.

That's not humanity. That's being a very expensive, very bored API.

Sure, some people get the genuinely creative roles. But for the vast majority, work has always been mostly drudgery. We just swapped the fields and factories for inboxes and spreadsheets, then got so used to it we stopped noticing how weird it was.

My long war with spreadsheets

Most of my career has been spent trying to fix this: finding the places where people are copying, pasting and chasing, and building better systems so they don't have to.

I've often joked that my purpose in life is to replace Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, one at a time. Only half joking. Somewhere in any business over a certain size there's a file called FINAL_v7_actual_final.xlsx quietly holding everything together, and someone whose whole week revolves around it.

What still surprises me is how many industries haven't even got past that first step. Plenty of businesses still run on email, spreadsheets and the one person who knows how it all fits together. Traditional automation never reached them, because the work was too messy. Every form was slightly different, every email needed a person to read it, and every exception broke the process.

Messy is exactly what AI is good at

That mess is where AI shines. It can read the email, make sense of the form, check it against what it should look like, and move it on to where it needs to go. The work that was too unstructured to automate is suddenly within reach.

So those industries don't have to crawl through twenty years of incremental systems work. They can skip ahead and clear out the drudgery in one go.

What's left is the human bit

We'll need to be honest about where and when AI is being used. Using AI to hide people away isn't the point. Using it to free them up is.

Because if it takes the drudgery off people's plates, what's left is the part only people can do: judgment, conversations, the awkward exception that doesn't fit any rule, noticing when something doesn't look right, and taking care of the customer having a bad day. That's the work most of us actually signed up for.

AI isn't going to take the humanity out of work. For most people, it might put it there for the first time.