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Your process documents describe one company. The workarounds, the chasing and the four-day approvals describe another. Point AI at the second one and it copies the mess at speed.
David Dean spent 20 years in enterprise technology, 10 of them leading AI, automation and data programmes across healthcare, insurance, hospitality and regulated industries. In this conversation he explains the gap between the official contract of a job and the unwritten contract that keeps the work moving, why he puts 79 percent of the workforce in a group he calls AI survivalists, and what the inbox already records about how a company behaves.
By the end of the episode, you can do three things. Name the undocumented behaviours your own role depends on, so a tool decision stops being a guess. Spot an AI project that will fail before the budget is gone, using one question about who was asked. Start a work diary this week with nothing beyond the notes app on your phone.
Listen now if someone is about to roll a tool out across your team and nobody has asked the people who do the work.
1. Every job description ends with "other duties apply", and that line is where the real work lives.
2. Workarounds come from a need for control or a need to survive the week, and they outlive the reason they were created.
3. David puts 79 percent of workers in a group he calls AI survivalists, people who are neither for AI nor against it.
4. AI copies and industrialises human behaviour, including the dysfunction, which is one reason projects stall.
5. Lived experience and lived consequence stay human, so risk decisions stay with leaders.
6. The first sign an AI project will fail is that nobody spoke to the people who will use the tool.
7. A dictated work diary on your phone turns invisible behaviour into something a team can actually read.
David Dean website: https://www.davidchristopherdean.com/
About David: https://www.davidchristopherdean.com/about/
An Inbox Between Us: AI and the Reality of Modern Work: https://www.davidchristopherdean.com/book/
Media: https://www.davidchristopherdean.com/media/
Appearances: https://www.davidchristopherdean.com/appearances/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidchristopherdean/
The AI Mirror (David's newsletter, published on LinkedIn)
0:00 Why AI and people both have to earn trust
0:52 Find your weakest productivity vector in five minutes
1:15 Meet David Dean, business AI realist
2:37 Twenty years in enterprise tech, and what it taught him
5:10 Why AI pilots run on assumptions and stall
7:17 The official contract and the unwritten one
8:54 "Other duties apply" is where the real work hides
12:54 Control, survival, and the workarounds nobody wrote down
16:39 The 79% nobody is designing the rollout for
21:16 Why pushing tools at people never lands
25:14 Four behaviours that keep work moving
26:33 Risk, lived experience, and what you give up
31:14 Output above quality, and where that ends
32:45 How AI industrialises dysfunction at scale
37:42 Quickfire: the AI use with no business value
39:07 The meeting costing twenty four thousand dollars in payroll
40:29 The slide every company puts up and nobody believes
41:16 The first sign an AI project will fail
41:55 What to put on your calendar before Friday
42:34 The frontline worker who felt replaceable
46:46 Where to find the book and the audiobook
47:31 Double down on human capital, differently