“They” Prefer Not To: Companies Don’t Want to Replace Employees With Robots. They Want to Turn Them Something That They’re Not.

CEOs are not good at reassuring employees about how AI won’t ruin their way of life. We’ve established that, over and over.

Next up, Lowe’s CEO Marvin Ellison, who said at a conference this week that the retailer isn’t looking to use AI to reduce its workforce, but rather, to make every employee into a bionic revenue-generating mo-chine. “Can we now free a merchant up who’s spending 50% of their time building spreadsheets, responding to emails, communicating with suppliers?” Ellison asked rhetorically. “If AI can take that task away, can you now take 50% of that merchant’s time, and they can focus on sales-driving initiatives? That’s what we’re trying to understand.”

Let’s start with “merchant”—a term execs at big retailers use to cheaply and flaccidly glorify their store workers as being part of a rich ancient tradition evoking the Maritime Silk Road, but amounting to a hill of shit. Imagine asking a woman in a bar what she does for a living and her saying, “Oh, I’m a merchant at Home Depot.” If she wouldn’t call herself a merchant with a straight face, how can you call her a merchant with a straight face? (I’ve never heard someone tell me he’s an “associate at Walmart,” either.)

NEXT!

Onto Marvin Ellison’s hypothetical “merchant”: Knowing what I know about the sort of folks who work at Lowe’s, where I shop all the time, I can tell you: If “they” were the type of hard-charger who wanted to focus 100% of the time on sale-driving initiatives, they would work on sales commission, somewhere else, where coffee is for closers.

In truth, however, “they” like building spreadsheets, responding to emails and communicating with suppliers. In fact, if you asked them their favorite part of their job, they would probably actually say, “Building spreadsheets, responding to emails and communicating with suppliers.” And they might even add that their job would be just about perfect, if they didn’t have to spend part of it “on these fucking sale-driving initiatives.”

NEXT!

Rather than using AI to turn employees into human revenue pigs—it might be more humane just to replace them with revenue-snuffling robots, and give them back their days.