“What I will say is that AI is not making work a happier place for anyone. It is making it more productive, it is making it more efficient. But you will see people churning at a much higher rate now than before. Because to have a connection to place, you need to have a connection to people.”
Our recent Alejo podcast guest Reidin O’Connor said this mid-interview and the words keep replaying in my mind. Reidin works with Growth AI – right at the intersection of human and machine learning, helping teams integrate AI into their workflows with playful curiosity instead of fear and dread.
For someone whose work is tied directly to the rise of AI, hearing her say plainly that it is not making work a happier place was both surprising and entirely refreshing. Of course it’s not! We all know that on some level already, and yet we find ourselves being swept along helplessly in the rapid river of AI Everything.
If we know this inevitable technology does in fact make workplaces less happy places – it begs the question, what does make work a happier place? And how would we begin to invest in those things, alongside the tremendous investment being made in emergent technologies?
This was on my mind while listening to an interview recently with Reid Wiseman, the astronaut who commanded the 2026 Artemis II mission to the moon. He was talking about the years of preparation, training, sacrifices and extremely hard work that led up to their moon mission this past April – and specifically about how the team members were not always friends, not always aligned. He said they actively utilized a team of operational psychologists (usually reserved for crises only) to help them team-build, problem solve, and work through issues that were coming up for them interpersonally as a crew. He recounted how exhausting it was but was unequivocal in stating that the work of building those relationships across differences, and investing in each other was the thing he was most proud of in the group.
It reminds me of the adage that people don’t have children to make their lives easier, they have children to create meaning. In our increasingly friction-averse culture, it occurs to me that it’s the difficult parts of our work days – delivering a hard-to-hear but essential piece of feedback, having a challenging conversation with a colleague, resolving a disagreement between coworkers, managing work style clashes, rebuilding trust after conflict, these are the acts that bring us closer to a sense of connection and meaning at work. It’s like that idea of the “fun scale” – where level 1 is that something is fun to do and fun to remember and level 2 hurts a bit to do but is fun in the rear view – the latter is the kind that stays with you, and that is most fulfilling in the long run.
It’s not just that that human element of our days is important, or that it is critical to our success, though it is both of those things – it is also in fact the best part of what we do, no matter the scale of the endeavor. It’s the part that, when we’re being interviewed about flying to the moon, we stop to describe as the thing we’re most proud of. What greater testament is there to the fact that spending time working on our relationships at work is where the real juice is?
As we continue to consider what will make workplaces happier in the age of AI, we need to be looking directly at each other for the answers. In our work at Alejo we have no ambiguity about it: we believe the human part is the best part. It’s true in life, so of course it’s true at work too.