Teaming in the AI Era: Why Work Feels So Hard And What To Do About It
Let me start with something honest.
In the past few months, almost every leader I coach has quietly asked me a version of the same question:
“Why does work feel harder than it used to? I swear I’m not doing anything differently.”
You are not imagining it. You are not broken, or worse than you used to be.
The ground under modern work really has shifted. And AI is not the only reason. It is just the most glamorous one.
The truth is that most teams are living inside a full tumult where AI adoption, re-orgs, budget cuts, attrition waves, and political turbulence are all happening at once. If the world of work had a weather report, we would be getting daily notifications that look like:
“Severe change conditions expected. Please secure all loose priorities.”
And inside this storm, something subtle and important is happening.
We went from episodic change to perpetual change.
For decades, we led teams through one major change at a time. A re-org here. A system upgrade there. We built the bridge from “today” to “the new normal” and marched everyone across.
That world is gone. Today, the waves never stop:
A new AI tool lands on your team and half your workflows get rewritten.
A re-org drops.
A budget adjustment follows.
Then someone says, “We also need to accelerate delivery next quarter.”
Leaders know the game has changed. But under stress, our habits have not. We fall back into the same old reflexes:
Launch a catchy slogan campaign to lift morale.
Roll out a new leadership framework to fix alignment.
Form a task force, because we always form a task force.
It is like trying to keep the ocean calm by yelling at the waves.
What AI is really doing to teams
Let’s talk about the star of the show for a moment: AI.
Yes, AI is powerful. Yes, it is going to reshape work. But here is the part we are not talking about enough. AI is creating clarity collapse, trust erosion, and team fatigue at a scale we have never seen.
A few examples I hear weekly:
You ask an AI tool to help with a workflow and it gives you something that looks brilliant but is secretly wrong. Half the team spends the week cleaning up the mess. This is a re-work loop caused by AI-slop, and it is happening everywhere.
Leaders are being told to move faster, automate more, and adopt tools they barely understand. Meanwhile, their teams are whispering, “Are our jobs safe?” and nobody knows how to answer that without getting legal involved.
Two people working together ask the same AI model two versions of the same question and get wildly different answers. Now they are arguing over which hallucination is correct.
And all of this is layered on top of the normal chaos of modern work.
AI did not arrive gently. It arrived during a tsunami.
So if you feel disoriented, tired, or slightly feral, welcome. You are not alone.
And now leaders have to do something new: team with human and non-human teammates at the same time.
This is the part nobody prepared us for. We are not just managing people anymore. We are managing people plus tools that behave like people.
This means:
You have to set expectations for your human teammates and your model teammates.
You have to check trust not only between humans, but between humans and the tools they rely on.
You have to build clarity not just about roles, but about which tasks belong to the humans and which tasks belong to the machines.
This is teaming in the AI era. The tools are not the problem. The context has changed, and our playbook has not.
The real fail point in change is not strategy. It is team capability.
Most transformations do not fail because of bad strategy. They fail because teams do not have the clarity, trust, or resilience to enact the strategy. They are drowning, not resisting. That is why I built a simple tool to help teams get a quick mirror moment in this new environment.
A Quick, Fun Way To See Where Your Team Really Is
I made a five-minute diagnostic called The Disruption-Proof Journey Quiz.
It is not a data scrape. There is no sales pitch.
It is simply a fast pulse check that shows you:
How your team is experiencing this new world of perpetual change
The stage they are currently operating in
One or two insights you can use immediately
Think of it as a mirror, not a report card.
And if your team is feeling the strain of AI, re-orgs, shifting priorities, or the general chaos of 2025, this little tool might give you exactly the clarity you have been missing.
If you are curious enough to take it, I would genuinely love to hear what stage your team lands in.
Because the truth is, we are all learning to team in a world that has never existed before. The teams that thrive will not be the ones with the coolest tech. They will be the ones with the right habits, the right clarity, and the right human infrastructure to ride the waves instead of being rolled by them.
More on this soon. 2026 will be a year of new products to address this exact issue!
Stay tuned.
