The Illusion of Productivity

LLMs (AI) in the workplace can highlight how many deliverables are inherently subjective. These are the potential danger zone for “productivity theater”: outputs that look impressive, but don’t reliably improve decisions or produce better outcomes. Because there’s no ground truth, the loop becomes: generate, review, tweak prompt, regenerate - version sprawl that looks like progress but may actually be mostly burning time.

The biggest, safest gains can often come from objective work with clear acceptance criteria and a checkable ground truth, assuming the task fits within the model’s capabilities. A quick litmus test for AI use cases in the workplace: If you can state acceptance criteria of the output up front, there’s a better chance of avoiding extended refinement loops. If not, you could end up with what amounts to the illusion of productivity.