Robin Schooling

Performative AI Takes the Stage

Somewhere this quarter, on a company earnings call you didn’t listen to, a CEO leaned toward the microphone and declared their company to be “AI-first.”

Analysts nodded and scribbled notes and the company stock ticked up a respectable amount. Meanwhile, back at headquarters, several thousand employees looked at the Copilot logo on their dashboard (the one they’ve been ignoring since the license rollout), and went on doing their jobs precisely the way they did them in 2023. This is the moment we’re in, and I’d like to give it the scrutiny it deserves.

In Real HR, I spent a fair number of pages skewering performative HR – the engagement surveys that go nowhere, the culture initiatives duct-taped together with cupcakes, the metrics we chase because they’re countable rather than because they’re meaningful, and the buzzwords that get road-tested on conference stages before being inflicted on unsuspecting workforces. Performative HR is activity dressed up as impact, and it has been the profession’s most reliable bad habit for decades.

Well, congratulations to all of us, because the 2026 sequel has arrived: performative AI adoption.

The Anatomy of the Performance

You’ll recognize the production when you see it, because the staging is remarkably consistent from one organization to the next. There’s an AI council (cross-functional, naturally), a steering committee, and at least one newly minted title containing the word “transformation.” There are enterprise licenses purchased at considerable expense and distributed with the enthusiasm of Wellness Committee members handing out gym memberships in January. There’s also an adoption dashboard tracking what percentage of employees have “engaged with” the tools this month; a number that gets reported upward with great ceremony and absolutely no curiosity about what anyone did once they “engaged” with the tools.

And there is, somewhere near the top of the house, an executive whose genuine objective is not better work but a better narrative. This leader’s primary ambition for 2026 is to stand in front of investors, a board, or a conference audience and say we are an AI-first organization and fervently hope that no one asks the obvious follow-up questions.

What there isn’t, in most of these productions, is any examination of the work itself. The approval chain that requires four signatures still requires four signatures; it just has a chatbot bolted to the front of it now. The meeting that should have been an email is still a meeting, though now the notes are AI-generated and read by no one. The processes, the workflows, the decision rights, and the org structure? All of them remain exactly where they were before except now there’s sexy new AI technology getting layered on top; a fresh coat of paint slapped on top of wallpaper that should have been stripped off years ago.

If this feels familiar, it should. It’s the same playbook as every performative HR initiative that came before it. We measured culture by counting pizza parties and now we measure transformation by counting tokens. Different measures, same hollowness.

Is it Strategy or Stagecraft?

Let me be clear about something, because this is the point where someone inevitably decides I’ve joined the resistance: I’m most assuredly not anti-tech. But I am anti-bullshit. Those are different positions, and the distinction matters.

There are organizations doing genuinely interesting things right now; they’re rethinking how work gets decomposed and reassembled, asking which tasks belong to humans and which don’t, redesigning roles around judgment and relationships rather than throughput, and accepting the uncomfortable structural questions that follow. That work can be slow, unglamorous, and largely invisible from the aforementioned earnings call. It’s also the most critical part.

So here’s the question I’d put to any C-suite presently congratulating itself on its AI posture: are you adopting AI to redesign work … or to be seen adopting AI?

One of those is strategy. The other is more akin to set design with subscription fees.

I think the question to ask yourself isn’t complicated at all … although it is clarifying. If every AI tool in your stack vanished tomorrow, would anything about how work flows through your organization need to be redesigned? Or would people simply go back to doing what they were doing anyway … just slightly slower? If the honest answer is the latter, then nothing was transformed. Something was installed – sure. But that’s a procurement achievement – not a strategic business achievement.

And HR, I’m sorry to report, is not an innocent bystander here. We’re frequently the stage managers of this production; rolling out the training, building the adoption dashboards, and drafting the “responsible AI usage” policies for tools nobody is meaningfully using. We’ve had decades of practice mistaking activity for impact, which makes us unusually well-qualified to help everyone else do the same thing! The profession that should be asking what does this change about the work and the people doing it is instead, in too many instances, simply asking how do we get the AI utilization numbers up before the QBR?

The Show Must Go On (and It Will)

Here’s what makes this particular brand of theater so durable, and I say this without much optimism about it changing: the performance works. Markets reward the announcement, investors are reassured, and the CEO who says “AI-first” gets a headline. The CEO who says “we’re twelve months into reexamining how work is structured and we’ve made real but modest progress” gets puzzled silence and a follow-up question from an investor about headcount. So yes; the stagecraft will continue – because the incentives all ensure that the razzle dazzle of the stage remains compelling.

What I keep thinking about is the gap that exists between performance (a sold-out opening night!) and endurance: initial reviews may reward the standing-room-only opening night spectacle, but only time will reveal if the organization truly redesigned work or merely covered it with sequins, feathers and great lighting design.

And the curtain call, as always, will come later.

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Summer Hours: Who Set the Expiration Date?

Let me confess something up front: there are few pleasures more complete than walking out of the building at noon-ish on a summer Friday, laptop abandoned, the whole golden afternoon stretched out ahead of you – the beach, the lake, the local watering hole, or, if we’re being honest, the couch. I am a devotee.

But somewhere between the second iced drink and the third, a question tends to surface: why only summer? Why do we treat this small mercy as a seasonal release, doled out in June and clawed back by Labor Day, as though our capacity to leave early were somehow tied to the position of the sun?

The whole arrangement, when you stop to look at it, is a fossil. Summer hours – summer Fridays, the early dismissal, whatever your company prefers to call it – descend from a very particular mid-century fantasy: the breadwinner husband loosening his tie a few hours ahead of schedule, the wife and kids already packed into the wood-paneled wagon, and the family making its escape to the shore before the rest of The City’s inhabitants clog the expressway. The whole point was to beat the traffic, claim the weekend, and feel, let’s admit it, a bit elitist.

That world – single income, summer house, a commute measured against everyone else’s commute – was never the one most of us lived in, and it certainly isn’t now. And yet the ritual has outlived its own logic. We’ve kept the gesture and quietly misplaced the reasoning behind it, which is a very workplace thing to do.

Proof of Concept

What I find quietly delicious about it is that summer hours are, if you squint, a confession from the-powers-that-be. For roughly twelve weeks a year, organizations cheerfully concede that the work can be accomplished in less time, that people can be trusted to compress their hours, and the general output doesn’t collapss because the office empties out at one o’clock on Friday. We prove it, collectively, every single summer. And then September arrives and we pretend we never learned a thing.

This seasonal framing is convenient precisely because it’s temporary. A company gets to feel generous without committing to much of anything, since the policy comes with its own expiration date stitched into it. It’s the corporate equivalent of a free trial at the gym or a Columbia House CD promotion where employees are programmed to enjoy the flexibility now before the regular pricing resumes in autumn. And because it reliably ends, no one is ever forced to sit with the more unsettling implication that if the work can survive a summer of short Fridays, then the rigid five-day week is and always has been much more habit than necessity.

Consider, too, that we’ve spent the last several years rearranging nearly everything about how and where work happens. We moved it home, then half-moved it back, and then argued about it for a couple of years longer than anyone enjoyed. We learned, whether we wanted to or not, that bodies in chairs was a measure of attendance and not of contribution. Set against all that upheaval, the survival of summer hours as a strictly summer phenomenon starts to look less like cherished tradition and more like just another failure of imagination from the HR Department.

But What to Do?

There are two options of course: get rid of “summer hours” all together (no thanks!) or move to 4-day workweeks for everyone. And I’m certainly not naïve about how up ending this ritual (benefit?) in just about any way, shape or form would play out. Disastrous!

Some work, of course, is genuinely seasonal and taking it easy in the summer makes sense for some businesses. There are also jobs and industries where the work is brutal regardless of what the calendar says. And, of course, incorporating “summer hours all year” would, in practice, simply become the new baseline; people would begin to negotiate for Thursday afternoons or Monday mornings off instead … because that’s always how these things tend to go.

Now I certainly don’t want to give up my summer Fridays – you’re going to have to pry them out of my cold, dead hands – but I would appreciate a little honesty about the premise we all continue to labor under. When will we come to the reckoning about how we all decided we can hand people their Friday afternoons in July without the sky falling, so why then can’t we manage to do that in February? Or November?

No one remembers setting the expiration date; I guess that’s why no one feels the urge or responsibility to lift it.

Improve or Transform? Which Will it Be?

“Transformation” is one of those concepts that bends under the weight of everything people project onto it. Depending on who’s using it and in what context, it can mean anything from a genuine, disruptive overhaul – when you blow something up and build a better version in its place – to the sort of measured, incremental continuous improvement that’s been a standard business practice since someone mapped out the Toyota Production System decades ago. Both are legitimate and both are necessary, but they are highly dissimilar ways of heading toward an outcome. And HR teams that are already drowning in ambition and desire to “change” or “transform” may, in fact, simply be struggling with how to approach consequential organizational evolution.

So when HR leaders, or pundits on stage at an HR conference, talk about “transformation” … is everyone on the same page?

Improving or Transforming?

The distinction between improvement and transformation matters more than most HR conversations acknowledge. Continuous improvement, rooted in the concept of Kaizen, the Japanese philosophy of small, ongoing change, is the incremental, steady effort to make existing processes better and more efficient by optimizing what’s already there. Low risk by design, it’s cyclical and iterative; when it’s working well, it becomes part of the operational DNA of an organization rather than an initiative that someone needs to announce and everyone else needs to survive.

Transformation is an entirely different proposition. It’s a structural overhaul aimed at changing the base state itself; not refining how things work but replacing what those things fundamentally are. It is, by definition, disruptive, and it requires significant investment, genuine change management, and an organizational willingness to absorb cultural upheaval along the way. The timeline isn’t cyclical; it has a beginning, an execution phase, and a new operational reality on the other side.

Part of the confusion amongst HR and organizational leaders (and there is genuine confusion) stems from a lack of understanding of organizational appetite: an organization’s comfort level with disruption and the pace at which change is expected to happen. Some organizations thrive on the “burn it down and rebuild” approach; others would break out in hives at the mere suggestion. Neither disposition is inherently wrong, but the gap between a leader’s appetite for disruption and an organization’s capacity for it is where transformation initiatives tend to skid off the tracks.

And part of it, honestly, is organizational size, which may get glossed over in a lot of these conversations.

Tales from Two HR Teams

Early in my career, I worked in an HR department of about 25 people, organized along the classic functional lines: I was the Recruiting leader and my peers headed up Benefits, Compensation, Employee Relations, HR Operations, and Learning and Development with all of us reporting to the VPHR. At some point during my time there, the decision was made to move to a new HCM system. What followed was a long parade of vendor demos, a narrowing-down process, a final decision, and then implementation planning in earnest. The whole arc – from the moment someone first had the thought to the day we went live – was mapped out over roughly three years. And it took that long. It was a major undertaking that touched every corner of the HR function and required real coordination, sustained communication, and deliberate attention to training and change management.

Later in my career, when I joined a mid-sized organization to lead our small HR team, I found myself staring at a moderately active recruiting process (3 to 4 open reqs at any given time with a few hundred applicants per requisition), running almost entirely on email, a spreadsheet, and collective goodwill. It was neither sustainable, efficient, or fun to be around for anyone. So I sat through a handful of demos, chose an ATS that both fit our needs and would bring us into the 21st century, and we went live within about a month.

The easy conclusion would be that the second situation wasn’t really “transformation” – that it was too small, too fast, too modest in scope to earn the word. But I’d push back on that assessment and the reason has nothing to do with size.

Go back to the distinction we started with – that transformation changes the base state while improvement optimizes what’s already there. By that test, the ATS rollout qualifies; not because it was big, because it wasn’t, but because it replaced a non-system with a system. There was no real process to refine (remember we operated with email, a spreadsheet, and a lot of hope) and I didn’t set out to make the old way better, but rather to replace what the old way fundamentally was. Had I instead swapped a clunky ATS for a slightly better one or tuned-up the workflows in a platform we already had, that would have been improvement – useful and worth doing, but not transformation.

Which is exactly why the two situations, three years and three weeks apart in effort, belong in the same category. Both changed the base state, both required a genuine shift in how work got done, and both demanded planning, decision-making, stakeholder communication, training, and the kind of steady follow-through that keeps things from quietly reverting to the old way. Both asked the people involved to let go of a familiar process, however inadequate, and adopt a new one. The timelines were different, the organizational footprints were different, and the complexity was different, but the fundamental nature of what was being transformed – and what it asked of the humans doing it – was not.

What gets lost in a lot of transformation conversations is that human element; all those “things” that we require of the human beings doing the work. And I don’t mean this in the feel-good inspirational-poster sense; I mean the specific, measurable reality that people have a finite capacity to absorb change, and that capacity matters whether you’re running a three-year HCM implementation or a four-week ATS rollout.

Scale doesn’t exempt anyone from the obligation to manage it well… and size doesn’t automatically confer the discipline to do so.

The Future Remains Unwritten

Which brings us back to the original question: are you transforming or improving?

For most HR functions, across any given year, the honest answer is some version of both. Continuous improvement keeps the wheels turning and the HR and People Operation healthy; it’s how we refine hiring processes, tighten onboarding logistics, and smooth out the performance feedback cycle. Transformation is warranted when the base state itself no longer works – when the current model isn’t competitive, when new technology demands a structural pivot, or when the gap between how work is designed and how people experience it has grown too wide for one more round of optimization to even close.

The trouble starts when those two get conflated. Many organizations reach for the language of transformation when what they’re describing is improvement, and that mismatch may carry consequences. The investment required, the change management involved, the human capacity needed – all of it calibrates differently depending on which road you’re traveling. Dress up routine improvement as transformation and you raise the stakes for no reason, burn through goodwill, and train people to be skeptical of the next big initiative before it even arrives. Run a genuine transformation as though it were routine improvement, and you’ll inevitably under-resource it, under-communicate it, and watch it stall.

So before you announce that HR is transforming, it’s worth asking a different question first: “are we changing the base state, or are we making the current one better?”

Both are worthy. Both deserve your discipline. They just don’t deserve the same word.

*****

Three Days Off, Four Days of Consequences

Another long holiday weekend is upon us in the US of A, and with it comes the predictable cascade of news coverage about gas prices, TSA lines, and highway traffic that somehow surprises us every single time. The holiday-meets-weekend alignment happens several times a year, and each time, a significant portion of the workforce collectively decides that it’s time to close the laptop, load up the car, and leave their coworkers to figure it out.

But guess what? The 3-day weekend isn’t really 3 days. It’s 5, at a minimum … and everyone knows it.

Thursday evening, of course, marks the unofficial start, which is why a certain kind of energy takes over offices on Thursday afternoons. By Friday, the people who do show up are operating at a level of productivity that can only be described as sloth-like. No meetings have been scheduled because scheduling a meeting on a pre-holiday Friday is considered, in most workplaces, an act of aggression. Instead, what happens is long lunches, a healthy amount of YouTube scrolling, and hallway conversations that start with “so, any plans?” (and last 25 minutes). The parking lot empties by 2 PM.

Then comes the long weekend itself which passes, as they always do, faster than it should. Naps, food and, perhaps, a few household chores fill the time.

And then Tuesday arrives. Tuesday, of course, is re-entry day, and it functions less like a workday and more like a controlled decompression chamber. No one schedules meetings before Noon on a post-holiday Tuesday because that, too, is an act of aggression. The morning is consumed by email archaeology as we all excavate our inbox and reconstruct what happened in the long-ago past. And by “past” we mean “last week.”

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A brief, necessary pause here: not everyone gets to observe a 3-day holiday weekend. For healthcare workers, hospitality staff, people in logistics, manufacturing, law enforcement (and many more), the calendar doesn’t automatically provide a holiday. For a lot of those folks, a national holiday just means more volume, more crowds and more cries of “we’re short-staffed again.” So remember that the 3-day weekend, if you get to observe it, is a workplace luxury. I certainly think that’s worth acknowledging before we commiserate further.

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And yet, somehow, despite the abbreviated effort on Thursday, the pleasant vacancy of Friday, the long weekend itself, and the gentle easing-back-in of Tuesday, we return feeling more wrung out than before we left. Navigating the post-holiday 4-day workweek feels like an expedition to the prairies of hell itself. We quickly realize that the time away – ostensibly to help us rest, relax, and recharge per workplace well-being gurus and HR teams – has instead rendered us barely able to make it through this shortened workweek. And no one has a satisfying explanation for this.

Because here’s what makes the compressed workweek so sneaky: it stacks everything that would have been spread across 5 days into 4, which means the pace is slightly higher, our calendars are slightly fuller, and the feeling that we’re behind-in-everything is slightly more overpowering than usual. By Thursday of the short week, it feels like we’ve been working for 11 days straight, that 3-day weekend of rest, relaxation and rejuvenation feels like a fever dream, and we get through it by sharing a mindset of collective delusion with our co-workers.

The 3-day weekend giveth.

But the resulting 4-day workweek absolutely taketh away.