AI Didn’t Replace Me — It Changed What My Company Expected Overnight
A year ago, I used to have small pockets of breathing room in my workday. Not free time exactly. More like recovery time. Ten minutes between meetings to organize my thoughts. Thirty minutes to draft an email carefully instead of firing off a response like a customer service bot trained on caffeine and anxiety. An hour to wrestle with a presentation before it became polished enough to send to leadership. Even the friction of work — formatting slides, summarizing notes, rewriting awkward sentences — created a strangely human rhythm. Then my company rolled out AI tools across the organization. Suddenly, everyone had access to systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, GitHub’s GitHub Copilot, automated meeting summarizers, AI-powered analytics dashboards, and internal prompt libraries designed to “streamline productivity.” At first, it felt revolutionary. And honestly? Some of it was. Tasks that used to take two hours now took twenty minutes. I could brainstorm faster, summarize faster, write ...
