AI is solving our hardest problems, optimizing just about every process, and making knowledge almost infinite. But in doing so, it’s quietly taking something from us — the friction where meaning once lived.
For decades, work has given us three deeply human motivators: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Daniel Pink explored those motivators at length in his powerful book, Drive (2009). Drive was a seminal book at a time, when tech companies were turning corporate culture on its head. I used some of the precepts of the book in building a highly successful and nationally recognized culture at Sundog.
We’ve long wanted to direct our own work, get better at something that matters, and connect to something larger than ourselves. But what happens when the machine does the work we once mastered? What happens when the “hard problems” — the ones that defined our identity, the ones that allowed us to flex our technical muscle — are solved by a prompt or an agent?
The Meaning Gap
The crisis of the next decade won’t be about job loss — it instead might be about meaning loss.
When intelligence becomes infinite, meaning becomes scarce. And when meaning disappears, engagement follows. We’ve seen this movie before: Engagement surveys flatline, culture programs stall, and people quietly check out — not because they’re lazy, but because they can’t see themselves, or the value they provide, in the work anymore. AI will accelerate that pattern unless we intentionally design for something different.
Culture as a Human Operating System
In a world of intelligent systems, culture will need to recast its focus on the human operating system. To do this, leaders must reimagine culture as an adaptive, measurable, and ethical system — one that sustains trust, creativity, and belonging. All the things algorithms can’t optimize. And this shift demands a new kind of leadership — one that designs human systems inside intelligent ones. It will demand leaders who don’t just manage tasks, but architect meaning; organizations that measure not only performance, but cultural health; and teams that use technology to enhance humanity, not erase it.
A Personal Reflection
I’ve spent much of my career helping organizations define culture — not as words on a wall, but as the living system that powers performance. Lately, I’ve been struck by how quickly that system is at risk of being rewritten. In the middle of all the noise about productivity, automation, and scale, one thing has become clear: The future of work and building successful cultures is going to be about doubling down on what makes us human, not about what can replace humans.
We’ve been through it. We’ll help you prepare for it.