Why AI isn’t showing up in productivity data? Chetan Dube offers one answer in Fast Company: most companies are bolting AI onto existing roles instead of redesigning the work.

Most managers are using AI the same way they use any productivity tool: to move faster. It summarizes meetings, drafts responses, and clears small tasks off the plate. That helps, but it misses the real shift. The real change begins when AI stops assisting and starts acting. When systems resolve issues, trigger workflows, and make routine decisions without human involvement, the work itself changes. And when the work changes, the job has to change too.

McKinsey data backs this up—78% of organizations now use AI in at least one function, “though some are still applying it on top of existing roles rather than redesigning work around it.” That’s the Solow paradox in one sentence.

Dube’s lost luggage example is a good one:

Generative AI can explain what steps to take to recover a lost bag. Agentic AI aims to actually find the bag, reroute it, and deliver it. The person that was working in lost luggage, doing these easily automated tasks, can now be freed to become more of a concierge for these disgruntled passengers.

The job goes from processing to judgment. And if leaders don’t get ahead of it:

If leaders don’t redesign the job intentionally, it will be redesigned for them, by the technology, by urgent failures, and by the slow erosion of clarity inside their teams.

That slow erosion of clarity is already visible. People less and less sure what they’re supposed to be doing because the tasks they were hired for are quietly handled by a system nobody put in charge.