You’re reading The Steady Beat, a weekly pulse of must-reads for anyone orchestrating teams, people, and work across the modern digital workplace – whether you’re managing sprints, driving roadmaps, leading departments, or just making sure the right work gets done. Curated by the team at Steady.
AI Workslop
The great AI productivity paradox is here, and it’s messier than your last sprint retrospective. While companies are doubling down on AI adoption – with fully AI-led processes nearly doubling last year and workplace AI use jumping 100% since 2023 – 95% of organizations report zero measurable ROI from their shiny new AI investments. It’s like watching everyone enthusiastically adopt a new project management tool that somehow makes everything take longer. The culprit? What researchers are calling “workslop” – the digital equivalent of busy work that AI generates when it’s deployed without clear purpose or context. Teams are churning out AI-generated reports, summaries, and content that feel productive but add no real value to outcomes. The result is a workplace version of empty calories: lots of activity, little nutrition. For leaders orchestrating teams in this AI-everything era, the lesson is brutally simple – adoption without plan, purpose, and ROI is just expensive theater.
— Harvard Business Review, 6m, #ai, #productivity, #strategy
AI-Proof Skills
As anyone can now prompt their way to a working prototype, what separates good products from great ones isn’t speed – it’s craft. Figma’s latest deep dive explores four distinctly human capabilities that AI can’t replicate: curiosity (asking “why” and “what if” before carving out a clear path), intuition (sensing what will truly resonate with customers beyond what works on paper), taste (knowing which ideas to refine and which to kill, even when it hurts), and intention (designing systems that give AI the guardrails it needs). The piece showcases real examples from teams at Plaid, CVS Health, Duolingo, and Polaroid who used these skills to create products that don’t just function – they connect. While AI can generate countless options and accelerate execution, it can’t decide to wander from the original scope, feel the pull of an unexpected idea, or weigh which technically correct solution creates the most trust and delight. In a world where features can be copied and functionality matched overnight, the feeling of using something crafted with intention becomes irreplaceable.
— Figma Blog, 8m, #craft, #product, #leadership
Trust Quotient
Kevin Kelly argues that as AI agents become more autonomous and handle increasingly consequential decisions – from booking flights to managing prescriptions – trust becomes the crucial differentiator. Unlike accuracy or intelligence, trust is asymmetrical: it takes time to build but can vanish instantly with a single mistake. Kelly envisions AI agents forming networks where each carries dynamic trust scores based on past performance, much like credit ratings. The highest-stakes insight? Most AI work will happen invisibly between agents, creating vast chains of interdependent trust relationships where your AI is only as reliable as its weakest sub-agent. Companies will eventually advertise their AI’s Trust Quotient (TQ) alongside traditional specs, and choosing AI workers will mirror hiring humans – you’ll want agents that not only deliver results but take accountability when they screw up. The twist: your personal AI agent will need its own stellar trust score to engage with other high-quality agents in the ecosystem, making AI reputation management a new essential skill for leaders.
— KK.org, 8m, #ai, #trust, #automation
Managing AI
The workplace AI revolution has a dirty secret: we’re drowning in machine-generated copy because people treat AI like a peer instead of a direct report. Documents are ballooning in length, meeting summaries get passed around like a game of telephone, and workers are copy-pasting LLM outputs wholesale. The author argues this happens because we’ve defaulted to a co-worker relationship with AI tools when we should be acting like managers. Drawing from Andy Grove’s “High Output Management,” he suggests applying task-relevant maturity (knowing when to step in versus step back) and managerial leverage (focusing on high-impact activities like providing proper context and quality control). The core insight: you’re still responsible when the AI-generated customer email bombs or the code assistant deletes your production database. The solution isn’t avoiding AI, it’s developing better taste for when AI output meets your standards and when it’s just sophisticated-sounding nonsense that wastes everyone’s time.
— hackpravj.com, 7m, #ai, #management, #productivity
Steady Ships
Steady’s latest updates tackle the coordination gaps that turn smooth-running teams into organizational whack-a-mole games. The team coordination platform rolled out shared Quick Fill templates, letting admins create goal-setting frameworks that work across entire organizations instead of forcing everyone to reinvent the wheel. Company holiday sync finally arrived – because apparently manually entering every bank holiday and company retreat into team tools is how we’ve been spending our valuable admin time. Enhanced Echoes now pull full issue descriptions from Jira and Linear, meaning your project summaries can actually tell you what’s happening instead of just listing cryptic ticket titles. We’ve also added participation streaks for check-ins and goals, because nothing motivates like a little friendly competition with yourself. The platform split check-in and goal participation into separate Insights reports, making it easier to diagnose whether your team’s radio silence stems from meeting fatigue or goal-setting apathy.
— Steady, 3m, #coordination, #productivity, #teamwork
Stop Drowning in “Work About Work”
Endless meetings, status updates, and context scavenger hunts are keeping your team from real work. Steady’s AI agents eliminate coordination chaos by delivering personalized, real-time guidance on what’s happening, what’s next, and what needs attention.
Stay in control of your team’s story while your people focus on creating and solving – not coordinating.
Learn more at runsteady.com.
