Thread regarding Edward Jones layoffs

Last quarter, I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees at $30 per seat per month—about $1.4 million a year. I packaged the whole thing as “digital transformation,” a phrase the board loved so much they approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what Copilot would actually do, including me. I promised it would “10x productivity,” which isn’t a real metric, but it sounds like one. When HR asked how we’d measure that, I told them we’d “leverage analytics dashboards,” and they promptly stopped asking. Three months later, I checked the usage reports: 47 people had opened it, 12 had used it more than once, and one of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds; it took 45 seconds and still required correcting hallucinations. Still, I declared the pilot a success—success meaning it didn’t visibly fail. When the CFO asked about ROI, I showed him a graph that moved up and to the right, charting a metric I invented called “AI enablement.” He nodded approvingly. We are now officially “AI-enabled,” whatever that means, and it’s proudly featured in our investor deck.
A senior developer asked why we didn’t just use Claude or ChatGPT, and I replied that we needed “enterprise-grade security.” When he asked what that meant, I said “compliance.” When he asked which compliance, I said “all of them.” His skepticism earned him a “career development conversation,” after which he stopped asking questions. Meanwhile, Microsoft sent a case study team who happily accepted my claim that we “saved 40,000 hours,” a number I produced by multiplying employees by a figure I made up. They didn’t verify it, and they never do. Now we’re featured on Microsoft’s website as a global enterprise achieving massive productivity gains, and the CEO shared it on LinkedIn to 3,000 likes—despite never having used Copilot. None of the executives have; we granted ourselves an exemption to avoid “digital distraction,” a policy I wrote. With licenses renewing next month, I’m requesting an expansion: 5,000 more seats. We haven’t used the first 4,000, but this time we’ll “drive adoption,” which means mandatory training—a 45-minute webinar no one watches but everyone completes, and completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards, dashboards go in board presentations, and board presentations get me promoted. I’ll be SVP by Q3. I still don’t know what Copilot actually does, but I know what it’s for: proving we’re “investing in AI.” Investment means spending, spending means commitment, and commitment means we’re serious about the future—the future being whatever I say it is, as long as the graph goes up and to the right.