Hello! 👋
It’s Thursday, 9th April 2026. Welcome back to Bold Efforts.
One of the strangest things about work right now is that teams are producing more and deciding less.
There are more documents, more summaries, more strategy notes, more content, more updates, more polished things moving around the company at high speed. But a lot of this is not progress. It is work-shaped noise.
That is the part of the AI era I think we still underestimate.
People call AI a productivity tool. Sometimes it is. But many companies do not mainly suffer from lack of speed. They suffer from lack of clarity. Too many priorities. Too many half-decisions. Too many things that sound serious and go nowhere. When you pour AI into that kind of system, you do not automatically get better work. You often get fake work at scale.
Fake work is dangerous because it looks real. It is the clean strategy deck that helps nobody choose. The summary that makes everyone feel informed without making anyone think harder. The five content drafts no one will remember. The internal documents that create the feeling of movement without the discomfort of commitment.
For years, effort acted as a filter. Writing took time. Research took time. Building a deck took enough energy that people had to ask whether the thing was worth making in the first place. That protection is disappearing. Now the cost of making something that looks finished has collapsed.
And once that happens, weak organizations get weaker.
They can now produce evidence of activity much faster than they can produce actual decisions. A quick note becomes three versions, then a summary, then a slide, then a longer plan, then talking points for a meeting that should not have happened. Everything moves faster, but nothing gets settled.
That is why content and document overload is not necessarily a good thing. In many cases, it is a sign that a company is avoiding the hard part. The hard part is not generating options. The hard part is choosing one.
Real work usually requires discomfort. A real decision closes doors. A real strategy disappoints some people. A real priority means other things must wait. Fake work protects teams from that discomfort. You can keep generating, refining, circulating, and polishing without ever saying clearly what you believe.
I think fake work will become one of the defining management problems of the next few years and we will see a number of consulting firms tackle this. Not because people are lazy, but because modern tools make it very easy to avoid decisive thinking. Soon the company is spending real human energy reviewing machine-assisted output that never deserved oxygen in the first place.
The best teams will not be the ones that produce the most. They will be the ones that can still protect signal. The ones that know when AI is helping a real decision move faster, and when it is just creating one more layer of very articulate delay.
See you next week.
Best,
Kartik
I write Bold Efforts every week to think clearly about where work and life are actually headed, not where headlines say they are. If you want these essays in your inbox, you can subscribe here.