We read a Business Insider essay this week. We closed it feeling sad.
Nothing in it is wrong. It is a day in the life of a founder who is sharp, driven and very good at her work.
But look at who the day is shared with.
The morning starts with an AI briefing. The inbox is triaged by AI. The walks are spent talking to AI. The evening ends with tasks handed to AI for the night.
She says she has “about 34 AI agents working for me.”
She says she is “constantly dictating to AI.”
She walks for an hour “while talking to AI.”
There are people in the essay too. Clients. An assistant. Family and friends at 7:30 p.m. But they sit at the edges of the day. The centre is a conversation with a machine.
This is not an attack on AI.
We use it at Gradstack. It saves us time and improves our output in certain areas like coding etc but what stayed with us is how normal it sounds. Nobody in the piece complains. Nobody seems lonely. That is the point.
We are being trained to see this as the goal. The best day is the fastest one. The one with the least friction.
But friction is where people live.
A coffee with someone who asks how you really are. A colleague who stops by your desk and changes your mind. A walk with a friend where you are not “using” the time.
These moments are slow. They are not meant to be productive. They are also where trust is built and where we feel known.
Every small human exchange we skip is one less chance to be surprised, challenged or comforted by another person.
Efficiency is not the same as connection. A faster day is not a fuller one.
Hiring is already living this
Work is where this shows up first.
75% of applications receive zero employer response (The Interview Guys, 2025).
By 2028, 1 in 4 job applicants will be AI-generated or fake (Gartner Research, 2024).
Read those two numbers together.
Machines write the applications. Machines filter the applications. Most people never hear back. No human ever looks them in the eye sometimes machines interview machines - wild!
A candidate does everything right and disappears into a big black hole. An employer wants to find great people and drowns in noise and bias.
Both sides are still human. The system between them has stopped acting like it.
A small challenge for all of us
This week, we set the team a challenge to do one thing that is deliberately inefficient and deliberately human.
Call instead of messaging. Walk with a person instead of a podcast. Let a conversation run long.
The tools will be there tomorrow. The people might not be, if we stop showing up for them.