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Companies bought a Ferrari and are using it to do a Suzuki's job. That is Shujaat Ahmad's description of how most organisations are deploying AI right now, and the cost of it is not just a wasted licence fee. It is the people who would have made the technology worth something.
Who is on this episode
Shujaat Ahmad is the founder of Belong & Lead and a former people analytics leader at LinkedIn. He also runs a cohort programme called Chai with AI through Belong & Lead.
What they covered
The myth Shujaat wants dead is that AI is an efficiency play. Cut payroll, do more with less, call it a win. His argument is that this framing caps your upside before you have found out what the upside is, and that it pushes out exactly the people who turn the technology into value: mid-career leaders and middle managers.
That leads into the part of the conversation most likely to make an executive uncomfortable. Culture lives or dies with the middle manager. Flattening the org without redesigning the work does not remove management overhead, it hands bigger mandates to managers who were already tired. The alternative Shujaat offers is to build teams for capability rather than capacity, which is a different question from how many people you need.
He also walks through his Purpose, Play and Profit framework, and tells a story against himself: he stopped using AI for his own writing after noticing he had forgotten how to structure an essay. Set against that is the OpenAI figure that moved him in the other direction, where the top 1% of agent users are running the equivalent of 13 full-time employees.
The conversation closes on cricket, Porto, and why 1992 still shapes how he thinks about underdogs.
Key insights
- Framing AI as an efficiency play caps the upside. If the goal is a smaller payroll, you will find a smaller payroll and stop looking.
- Culture lives or dies with the middle manager, which makes that layer the worst place to cut first.
- Flattening the org without redesigning the work just gives tired managers bigger mandates.
- Build for capability, not capacity. The question is what the team can do, not how many of them there are.
- The top 1% of agent users are running the equivalent of 13 full-time employees, which is a measure of leverage rather than headcount reduction.
- Shujaat stopped using AI for his own writing after he forgot how to structure an essay. Leverage and atrophy come out of the same tool.
Watch the full conversation on YouTube, or listen to the audio version on Apple Podcasts.
