Vol.038 — AI Adoption Series: I Spent Hours Babysitting My New AI Staff. When Does It Actually Pay Back?
Date: 2026-06-03 | Newsletter
Key Summary
A new digital staff member joined the team, and Zenta caught himself babysitting her — designing tasks, prompting, verifying, redoing — for work he could have done himself in twenty minutes. That, he says, is the Tuesday-morning version of adoption: right now it is more work, not less. The honest question is whether AI adoption ever pays back, and he can’t find anyone who has actually proven the long-term half — vendors measure demos, Big Tech measured activity and got gamed (Amazon scrapped its AI-usage leaderboard after “tokenmaxxing”), consultants measure feelings, and a METR study found developers were 19% slower while feeling 20% faster. The AI “new grad” is confident, capable, and amnesiac again every task, so its payback — if it comes — won’t announce itself. His conclusion: stop feeling and start counting. Pick one or two things you can measure at the end of the line — customer served faster, invoice out correctly, rework down — and watch those. Do it simple — be patient with the new grad, but keep score, because it won’t graduate itself.