Is your AI a Butler or a Poltergeist? 🤖

I was chatting with an executive last week who looked like she’d just spent forty-eight hours trying to assemble IKEA furniture in the dark. “Lara,” she sighed, “we’ve added five new AI tools to the department this month. We have a workflow for the prompts, a system for the outputs, and a Slack channel just to complain about it. Why does it feel like the ‘robots’ are winning?”

It’s the great irony of 2026. We were promised that AI would be the ultimate “Butler”—quietly handling the chores while we focused on the big ideas. Instead, for a lot of brands, the AI has become a Poltergeist. It’s moving things around, making weird noises, and generally creating a mess that humans have to spend all day cleaning up.

We’ve fallen into the “Smart Home” Trap.

The “Smart Home” Without a Manual

Imagine you decide to turn your house into a “Smart Home.” You’ve got the voice-activated lights, the fridge that orders milk, and the robot vacuum that knows exactly where your rug ends. On paper, your life is seamless.

But in reality? The lights only turn off if you whisper in a specific Swedish accent. The fridge orders ten gallons of milk because it misread the expiration date. And the vacuum? It’s currently stuck in the curtains, screaming for help.

This is what happens when we adopt AI without human adaptation. We buy the “shiny objects” (the tools) but we don’t fix the plumbing (the systems). We expect the tool to be the strategy, forgetting that a tool is only as good as the person holding it. If your team is still thinking with a 2019 mindset but using 2026 tech, you aren’t more efficient—you’re just frustrated in high definition.

The “Intern” Logic: AI Needs a Manager

The mistake isn’t using AI; it’s assuming AI is the CEO.

In reality, AI is the World’s Fastest Intern. It’s incredibly eager, slightly overconfident, and it has no common sense. If you give a disorganized intern a messy desk and no instructions, they aren’t going to fix your business—they’re just going to create a bigger mess, faster.

Adapting to AI isn’t a technical skill; it’s a management skill. It requires the “Human Loop”:

The Logic: Does this tool actually solve a human problem, or are we just trying to look “tech-forward”?

The Data Hygiene: Is our information clean enough for a machine to read, or is the AI just “hallucinating” based on our own bad filing habits?

The Guardrails: Where does a real person with a real brain step in to make sure the “robot” hasn’t accidentally deleted the brand’s soul?

For more info read Bad Business Advice.

Waking Up the System

The brands that are actually finding that “beach time” we were promised aren’t the ones with the most tools. They’re the ones with the best integration.

They’ve realized that human adaptation means changing how we work, not just what we use. If your team is “nodding along” in meetings while secretly spending hours fighting with their tech stack, you don’t have a performance problem; you have a system problem.

Authenticity in 2026 means being human enough to admit when the machines are making your life harder. It’s time to stop serving your AI and start making it serve you. You need a blueprint where the human provides the “why” and the machine provides the “how.”

The Monday Morning Reality Check

Take a look at your team’s “top 5” daily tasks.

How many of them are actually moving the needle, and how many are just “managing the machines”? If you’re spending more time fixing the “Smart Home” lights than you are actually living in the house, it’s time to rewrite the manual.

To working smarter (and keeping the vacuum out of the curtains),

Lara