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AI Org Chart

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My AI Mad Libs cartoon last week on urgency without clarity in AI strategy was one of my most licensed cartoons from the last 24 years.

It got me thinking of the trickle-down effects of muddled strategy through an organization.

Whenever there's ill-defined strategy at the top, there will be poor alignment all the way down. This is particularly true with something as consequential yet open-to-interpretation as AI.

The quickest lever of AI adoption is a mandate just to do more with less.

The recent 40% layoffs by Block (and 20% stock price bump in response) is catnip to companies excited about using AI primarily to justify cost-cutting. This has been criticized as "AI washing."

But the effects of this type of AI cost-cutting throughout the organization carries a cost, as Kate Niederhoffer, Alexi Robichaux and Jeffrey T. Hancock have been chronicling in a series of HBR articles on the rise of "workslop" driven by unclear AI mandates:

"As companies have tightened budgets, consolidated roles, and asked employees to take on more tasks without formal role redesign, individual contributors and frontline managers are stretched more than ever. This has left employees psychologically depleted and juggling heavier workloads.

"In this context, blanket mandates to use AI—often without the training, agency, or cultural trust to thoughtfully experiment with these powerful new tools—end up encouraging people to use AI performatively. These low-effort, low-value uses demonstrate compliance with directives to experiment, even as they shift the burden of the work onto the receiver. Hence, workslop."

Ironically some of the most interesting cases of AI adoption may come, not from organizations, but from individuals using AI to amplify side projects.

Keynotes

I’m joining Freshworks tomorrow (Tuesday, March 10) to give a keynote on “The Funny Side of Complexity” in a free webinar. Details here.

I’m excited for a range of in-person keynotes later this year, including Texas, Wisconsin, Mexico City, and New Zealand.

As always, please let me know if you’d like to talk about any events you’re planning (or know of) that you think could be a good fit for some cartoon levity and insight.

For an idea of my approach to keynotes, here’s a full 30-minute keynote from one of my favorite events last year — Opticon 2025 hosted by Optimizely:

Cartoon From The Archives

Here’s a related cartoon I drew in 2018. And here’s where you can read and search all 24 years of these cartoons.

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Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

P.S. If you like these marketoons, here are a few ways to help:

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4. Buy my latest book

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About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.