Summary: An ad promised 20 AI “employees” for the price of one tool — an org chart of avatar faces that, fact-checked, turned out to be a bundle of prompts. That’s the productivity layer dressed in transformation language, and it’s everywhere. AI commoditizes fast and works on the lowest common denominator, so if everyone uses it the same way to go faster and cheaper, the advantage cancels itself — everyone just reaches mediocre quicker. The more AI floods the world with competent but hollow content, the more a distinctly true, connected brand stands out. Production quality dropped to zero; the test for excellence went up.

Still from Napoleon Dynamite (2005), directed by Jared Hess. © Fox Searchlight Pictures. All rights reserved by the copyright holder and no affiliation with or endorsement by the copyright holder is implied. Used for commentary purposes only.

The AIification of Bullshit

I saw an ad on LinkedIn last week that promised 20 AI agents that were literally "employees" for the price of one tool in Claude. The customer would get a full team, right out of the box. A Growth Strategy Architect at the center, surrounded by an ICP Builder, a Cold Outreach Agent, a Content Strategist, a Funnel Optimizer. Little avatar faces depicted each AI-employee. An org chart showed how the AI-employees reported to each other. A "Strategy Layer" label across the top.

What? I'd seen a lot of these lately and had an idea. I'd ask Claude what was real and what was, well, B.S. I pasted the ad into Claude, which is the AI the ad was touting, and asked "is this real?" Claude said, and it should know, right:

*It's a bundle of prompts.*

*That's it. One model, responding to one prompt at a time, with no persistent memory between "agents," no actual specialization, and no coordination layer. The avatar faces are doing the heavy lifting. The org chart is theater. The "Strategy Layer" is a label on a screenshot.*

*And it's everywhere now.*

*Not just in ads. In keynotes. In consulting decks. In the breathless LinkedIn posts about AI transformation that fill your feed every single day. The language is big. Reinvention. Disruption. The future of work. The companies doing it right. The ones falling behind.*

*Peel it back and most of what you find is the productivity layer dressed up in transformation language. Summarization, pattern-finding, drafting, data wrangling. Real capabilities. Genuinely useful. Also not what they're selling you. They're selling you a revolution. What you're getting is a very fast intern.*

Back to my real world

I'm not against AI. That would be like saying I am against hammers, laptops or Figma. Claude helps me save time and that's real and valuable. Some things it's super helpful, others, not. But there's a difference between a tool that helps us work better and a con that promises to replace the need to think or no longer needing to work with talented people.

There's a lot that concerns me about how AI is sold and used, but the constraint in most organizations isn't the technology. It's the judgment around quality and organizational trust. You can't automate what you can't document. And most companies' internal operations are too messy and too political to automate at the level the AI hype implies.

But that doesn't sell, right. Coherence is slow and uncomfortable. Prompts with avatar faces are $49.99 and arrive in your inbox one-click away. Please! Makes me think of Pedro's campaign promise from Napoleon Dynamite, "Vote for me and all your wildest dreams will come true."

For anyone working in talent, employer brand, or culture, this matters more than you might think. AI commoditizes fast. That is not likely to stop either. But it also works on the lowest common denominator theory. AI was trained on the best and worst of the internet. It can't always tell the difference.

AI can absolutely write lowest common denominator job descriptions, draft lowest common denominator EVP copy variations, build lowest common denominator content calendars, produce lowest common denominator creative briefs.

If the aim is faster work and to cut costs, and the lowest common denominator is acceptable, the speed and cost savings advantage negates itself almost immediately. Everyone else using the same AI the same way will be just as fast and just as LCD. The net effect is zero. Nobody improved. Nobody saved anything. Nobody stands out. Just got to mediocre quicker.

No one raises their hand and says, we want the lowest common denominator brand or work. And the people closest to the work, your EB and TA teams, often know this better than anyone. But when the directive from above is faster and cheaper, LCD is what gets built, whether anyone admits that or not.

So what creates value?

Diagnosis. Prediction. Modeling. The ability to be in a room, even virtual, read it correctly, and say the things that need to be said. Strategic counsel that requires understanding the organization, not just a brief. Quality requires trust, context, and the willingness to be brave in front of people whose opinions of your work matter for you to continue doing work.

The irony is that the more AI floods the streets, copy and images with competent but hollow LCD content, the more a distinctly true connected brand stands out. The bar for production quality may drop to zero. The test for excellence went up.

And there's research to back this up. Researchers at Cornell University recently published a peer-reviewed study that built, I bullshit you not, a Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale. They created an algorithm that assembled real corporate buzzwords into sentences that were grammatically correct but completely meaningless. Statements like "Working at the intersection of cross-collateralization and blue-sky thinking, we will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing and end-state vision." Then they asked working professionals to rate how much "business savvy" those statements expressed.

People fell for it. Consistently.

Even more disturbing is that some real quotes from actual Fortune 500 executives were statistically indistinguishable from the algorithmically generated nonsense. That bears repeating. Trained professionals could not reliably tell the difference between what a real CEO said and what a machine randomly assembled from buzzwords.

The study found that the more receptive someone is to corporate bullshit, the worse they perform on work-related decision-making tests. And people who fall for it are also more likely to spread it. How many times have you seen a phrase overcooked to crisp because everyone jumps on it like, well, flies to you know what. Bullshit in, bullshit out, and it takes a lot of courage to stop and ask if any of it means anything.

Now turbocharge that with AI.

What the Cornell researchers built in a lab to test human gullibility is essentially what AI does every day at lightspeed. It assembles language that sounds right, passes the pattern-recognition test, and says “ship it”. No intent. No meaning. No point of view. Just syntactically correct, semantically empty output. The lowest common denominator generated faster than any human team could produce it and with zero awareness that it's saying next to nothing.

That's a judgment problem, most often made by the very people buying org charts made of AI prompts, like the ad that sounded like magic in a click mentioned at the beginning of this article.

The companies loudly promoting AI transformation have mostly already made their money. The rest of us are living inside an uncontrolled experiment on the global consumer economy, with all our livelihoods in the balance and the results won't be clear for a decade.

In the meantime, the better decision-making is whether or not AI’s work is worth anything to an audience that’s not AI when everyone's producing the same thing. Buy the less than honest claim of a full company made of AI prompts if you want, it could make your wildest dreams come true.

I asked AI to fact-check an ad selling AI that promised to get everyone to the Moon, and Mars, and Jupiter at lightspeed. My spider sense was tingling. The answer was uncomfortable and honest. If you’re like me, you may find it pretty funny, too. It also has a lot to do with what's happening to brand, talent strategy, and the quality of work we're willing to accept.