AI at Work: Power, Promise, and Peril

Turn disruption into opportunity and put yourself on the winning side of change.

By Dustin Brown, guest blogger

The Ways We Work

Volume 1, Number 4

A History Worth Remembering

When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Silicon Valley shed 85,000 high-tech jobs almost overnight. Wages were cut in half for engineers who once believed the party would never end.

One developer recalled: “Older friends went without work for a year, only to eventually get jobs paying half of their original salary.” That wasn’t theory. It was lived reality.

But history didn’t stop there. Out of the rubble came Amazon, Google, and Salesforce. Entire industries like cloud computing and SaaS that didn’t exist before were born. The bubble destroyed, but it also created.

Those who adapted thrived. Those who clung to the old ways disappeared. That’s the right frame for AI. Don’t confuse hype with outcome. The bubble was noise; the infrastructure and business model shifts were power. AI will be no different.

The real question is not whether it will change the game, but who will gain power and who will lose it.

The Present: What AI Delivers

Strip away the headlines, and here’s what AI does for enterprise sellers like me.

1. Use AI Tangibly

AI is not magic. It doesn’t replace judgment, experience, or skill. What it does is collapse the time it takes to extract insight.

I can feed a 50-page earnings transcript into a model, ask three smart questions, and get distilled themes that tell me what a CFO or CIO really cares about. That’s leverage.

But let’s be clear. AI will not make a bad seller into a good one. If you don’t know what questions to ask, the tool won’t save you.

For the skilled, though, AI is a force multiplier. A good seller becomes faster. A great seller becomes a machine. The technology doesn’t teach. It amplifies.

2. Work Smarter

Time is the ultimate currency in sales. Forecasting, pipeline notes, QBR decks, call prep; these can swallow 60% of a seller’s week.

Microsoft research shows:

• 90% of developers using AI felt more productive

• 88% reported better throughput

  
  

Productivity is power because it creates more time to spend with customers. But speed without skill is just faster mediocrity. You still need to know how to run a QBR, craft a story, and interpret a pipeline.

3. Harness ADHD

I live with ADHD. My brain processes fast, but sometimes chaotically. AI turns chaos into structure.

I can dump notes, filings, and analyst reports into a model and watch it organize information into action steps. For me, it’s like hiring a chief of staff who never sleeps.

Still, AI doesn’t know what matters until I decide. My brain sets the agenda; AI sharpens it.

4. Organize Workflows

Enterprise sellers juggle ten systems: CRM, Slack, Outlook, spreadsheets, and enablement tools.

AI doesn’t eliminate the tools, but it acts as connective tissue. I can stitch workflows together instead of being consumed by them.

And the results are real:

• MIT research: highly skilled workers using generative AI boosted productivity by nearly 40%

• Toyota: cut 10,000 hours of repetitive work with AI

• McKinsey: projects up to $4.4 trillion in global productivity gains

The numbers are too large to dismiss.

The Present: What Keeps Me Up at Night

The same tools that help can also hurt.

• Noise: Every vendor now claims “AI-powered.” Most aren’t. That branding overload erodes trust. Customers don’t want buzzwords. They want outcomes.

• Societal Upheaval: Clerical workers vanished in the dot-com era. AI now poses a threat to paralegals, junior accountants, and content writers.

• The Trust Deficit: The same executives who polarized societies with social platforms are shaping AI. Trust will not be automatic.

• Data Exposure: Where do prompts go? Who owns the conversations? If you don’t know who benefits from the data trail, assume it isn’t you.

• Stress: AI increases productivity but also “technostress.” Users report exhaustion and blurred boundaries.

The Parallel: Dot-Com vs. AI

The dot-com era displaced millions but created the digital economy. AI will do the same, but the stakes are larger.

Winners then: those who moved online early, built SaaS, and owned infrastructure. Winners now: platform owners, executives who integrate AI into cost control, and individuals who wield AI as leverage.

Losers then: clerical staff, brick-and-mortar middlemen. Losers now: routine knowledge workers and companies that adopt AI as a branding tool but not an execution strategy.

The lesson: don’t mistake survival for winning. The bubble was a power shift, not a correction. AI is the same.

The Future: Guardrails and Responsibility

With great tools come great abuses. Social media “connected the world” but also fueled addiction and destabilized democracies.

Believing AI will only create upside is naïve.

Responsible adoption must include:

• Demand Transparency: Users must know where prompts and data go, who owns them, and how they’re secured.

• Set Guardrails Early: Regulation lags innovation. Guardrails must be built before misuse becomes irreversible.

• Balance Power: AI won’t democratize evenly. The powerful will gain more unless responsibility is designed in.

A Seller's Perspective: Metrics not Mantras

As sellers, we don’t deal in hype. We deal in metrics.

Executives don’t care about “transformative potential.” They care about EPS, SG&A, and cash flow.

If AI moves those numbers, it gets adopted. If it doesn’t, it gets ignored.

That’s how you should judge AI in your own career. Forget the philosophy for a moment. Ask yourself:

• Does this tool make me faster?

• Does it help me win more deals?

• Does it give me leverage over my peers or competitors?

If yes, use it. If not, drop it.

Closing: Realism Over Hype

AI is not a savior or an apocalypse. It is a mirror and a multiplier.

In the hands of the prepared, it creates leverage, clarity, and efficiency. In the hands of the careless, it creates chaos, stress, and inequity.

The dot-com bubble taught us that disruption is inevitable. Progress is optional.

Winners don’t cheerlead. They adapt. Losers cling to the past or get lost in the noise. So stop asking whether AI will change the game. It already has.

The real work is deciding how you’ll use it: to sharpen your edge, expand your influence, and shift the balance of power in your favor.

Because the future of work won’t be evenly distributed, it will tilt. Your opportunity is to stand on the right side of that tilt and bring others with you.

Follow our journey at trymeerkat.ai and connect with us on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date with the latest resources, insights, and updates.