AUA: What Keeps Teams Together When AI Does The Work?
About this episode:
Original Air Date: April 13, 2026As AI handles more and more of the actual work, a genuinely hard question emerges: how do you maintain shared purpose when there's no single organization anchoring it?
In this mini AUA, Rodney and Sam argue that more automation requires more intentional human connection, not less — and that AI might actually force a long-overdue shift from obsessing over outputs to talking about outcomes and purpose.
Mentioned in this episode:
“recent change skills episode”: AWWTR Ep. 42
Greg Shove: AWWTR Ep. 41
In this episode:
Rodney Evans
Sam Spurlin
Listen now:
Episode transcript:
Rodney Evans:
Hey y'all. Welcome back to At Work with The Ready. I'm Rodney Evans and that guy is Sam Spurlin.
Sam Spurlin:
Hello everybody.
Rodney Evans:
Every other week we are tackling one tough thought provoking listener question sent to us by you and sharing a few ideas that might help. Let's get right to it. Sam, what have you got for us this week?
Sam Spurlin:
All right. This week's question is, as work becomes more fluid with people and AI collaborating across different teams and organizations, how do we keep a shared sense of purpose when there's no single organization to anchor it?
More automation means more intentional human collaboration
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. I have a lot of thoughts about this question. I found it very provocative so thank you to the listener who sent it. I have a bit of a ratio in my brain, which is the more automation we experience in our day-to-day, the more intentional we have to be about what is human. And that looks like probably more in person, live, face-to-face collab, more communication. It's going to be so easy for the agent to talk to the agent, to talk to the agent, to talk to the agent. And there never to be human sense making, which on the one hand, great for efficiency probs. On the other hand, we're going to get dumb really fast. And so I sort of think the more AI collaboration is happening inside of your org, the more human intentional collaboration must also be happening as a counterweight. And before you at me, I'm not talking about everybody returning to in person.
Sam Spurlin:
I was going to poke you on that. Dang it.
Rodney Evans:
Don't do it. I'm not going to say go back to the office, but I am going to say for teams that are like, "Well, we're more automated than ever. Do we really need that quarterly offsite?" Yeah, you do. Or for the team that's like, "Right now we work in person one day a week. What if it was one day a month?" Don't do that. Actually more what makes us human, staying in touch, not avoiding each other is going to be required. We're going to have to do that really intentionally because it's going to be easier and easier not to do it.
Why AI should push teams to focus on purpose, not just output
Sam Spurlin:
Yeah. No, I love that. Where my head goes with this is if you have AI handling more and more nitty gritty of the work, it forces us ideally to elevate our gaze to outcomes. And if you're starting to really talk about outcomes, then purpose has to be in that conversation as well, because otherwise, what are our outcomes aimed at? So I think that's actually one of the things that's really interesting with AI potentially in the future is that maybe we can move away from all this output focused conversation about the work because it is probably in some ways going to become even more inscrutable when the AI is doing its thing. And hopefully that frees us up then to be talking about, well, what are we doing this in service of? How do we know if the AI is moving us towards our outcomes? Have we talked about them?
Have we defined them? Are they in service of what? And I think doing that in what you just described, in that face-to-face human way, those are the conversations that AI can't have that will determine whether we're moving in the right direction as an organization.
Leaders need a simple, clear message right now
Rodney Evans:
Love that. The last thing that I will say is like, I don't know if the person who wrote this is on a leadership team, like on the ELT or whatever you call it, but I do feel like this is a moment. It is very chaotic. It's very chaotic in the world and then it's also very chaotic on the tech landscape. And so, I do feel like the people who have the most power, having a real drumbeat about what the company is trying to do is so important and like simpler language, shorter phrases, repeated more frequently, I think is really necessary right now.
Sam Spurlin:
All right. Love it. That's it for this mini. If you've got a question of your own, hit us up at podcast [at] theready [dot] com.
Rodney Evans:
We will see you back here next week for a full episode of At Work with The Ready. Thank you so much for listening.