AI is Our New Employee

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Question:

Our newly hired marketing director impressed everyone with the polished materials she submitted with her application. Much of what she’s turned out in the last two months has been just as strong: clear, organized, and professional. Not only that, but she also cleared a backlog of projects that had been sitting on marketing’s desk for months.

Occasionally, however, she produces materials that are obviously AI-generated: polished wording that sounds professional but ultimately says very little. This makes many of the senior partners who work the old-fashioned way deeply nervous.

As HR, the problem landed on my desk.Here’s what I learned. She uses AI for almost everything and has for the last three years. She also says she “can’t” work without AI. I pressed her, and I think she means it. She says she gives “Claude” scattered notes, and “he” organizes them, almost as if he’s her partner. She says she doesn’t even know how she’d get started on many projects without his initial drafts.

Do we fire her?

Answer:

Don’t fire her, at least not yet. You’ve hired someone who produces polished work quickly and who clearly understands how to leverage new technology. Those are valuable strengths.

If you work with your new hire, and if she’s willing to change how she uses AI, your firm will reap the benefits. Reports that took days to write can be drafted in hours. AI can help create terrific presentations. Additionally, AI’s editing skills can benefit many of your senior employees. Your new hire may even introduce them to technology they haven’t yet explored.

That said, you and your marketing director cannot ignore what you have just uncovered.

She’s not using AI as a productivity aid. She’s leaning on it as a cognitive prosthetic. In her own words, she doesn’t know how to start projects without it.

AI speeds the drafting of reports, emails, and presentations, sharpens structure, and helps organize complex ideas. But it cannot replace judgment or the ability to think through a messy problem from scratch. Those muscles matter even more in roles where employees need to decide what the work should say, not just polish how it’s said.

The risk you see in her materials reflects that gap. AI can produce flawless sentences that look authoritative yet say absolutely nothing. When an employee relies on it heavily, the writing can look crisp and professional while remaining empty of critical substance.

Your marketing director has allowed a convenient tool do too much of her thinking for too long. Instead of using AI as an assistant, she’s used it as a crutch and has forgotten how to walk on her own.

That’s a coaching issue. My guess—she’ll be open to change, because her own admission should worry her even more than it worries you. Give her one of the recently released studies that report “excessive reliance on AI-driving solutions” may contribute to “cognitive atrophy,” https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/11/is-ai-dulling-our-minds/.

If she’s willing to change, set a practical guardrail. AI can be her second step, not her first. Give her the goal of thinking through every project first by outlining the core argument, strategy, or recommendation before she opens any AI tool.

If she truly can’t produce ideas, outlines or strategic recommendations without an AI prompt, she’s not using AI as an editing tool. She expects it to think for her. At that point, termination becomes a legitimate option. You can’t afford her sending a client a polished document that contains subtle but consequential errors.

You hired a marketing director, not an AI program. Let her know that AI can ride in the passenger seat, but she needs to take the wheel.

© 2026 Lynne Curry, PhD, SPHR, SHRM-SCP authored “Navigating Conflict” (Business Experts Press, 2022); “Managing for Accountability (BEP, 2021); “Beating the Workplace Bully,” AMACOM 2016, and “Solutions 911/411.”