At 9:12, she opened the chat.
At 9:34, she sent the documents to the client.
At 10:06, her colleague woke up.
A good specialist. The workflow had simply managed without him today.
They used to do this together.
She gathered the inputs. He worked on the structure. Then they got on a call, clarified things, debated the wording and agreed to take another look tomorrow.
Tomorrow had a full-time job on this team.
Today, she decided to try it herself first. With AI.
She uploaded the materials. Explained who the documents were for and what decision they needed to support. Asked it to find gaps, compare options and check the numbers.
She didn’t like the first answer.
The second was better.
By the third, she’d spotted a mistake in her own brief.
She corrected it. Read everything again. Deleted two paragraphs that made it sound as though the company had already won an award for a project that didn’t exist yet.
She hit send.
It was good. Faster than usual. In places, even better.
Which complicated things.
If the AI had produced rubbish, everyone could have kept their usual place on the team.
At 10:08, her colleague messaged.
“Morning. When shall we jump on a call about the documents?”
She looked at the email in her Sent folder.
Then at his message.
She didn’t say that, obviously. She considered herself quite a tactful person. Especially when silent.
“I’ve already sent them.”
The three dots appeared almost immediately.
Disappeared.
Appeared again.
For twenty dollars a month, the chatbot was taking her independence considerably better.
He hadn’t let anyone down.
He hadn’t missed a deadline. He hadn’t vanished for a week. They’d planned to work on the documents today, and today had barely started.
She’d simply woken up earlier and found a way to get the work done without waiting.
Should she have waited?
Left half the document unfinished so he’d have something to do?
Invited him to a meeting whose outcome was already sitting in the client’s inbox?
“I need your help” would have sounded lovely.
Especially if she no longer needed any.
Delegating to AI had gone well.
She’d provided context, set constraints and checked the result. She hadn’t mistaken the first confident answer for divine revelation. Responsibility for the email remained hers.
Perfectly good work.
Nobody had explained what to do with the person who used to occupy the middle of that process.
His calendar still said he was essential.
Her Sent folder had begun to disagree.
“You could have at least shown me,” he wrote.
She could have.
But what, exactly, did “shown me” mean?
Ask him to check the quality? Give him a heads-up? Request permission? Reassure him that they were still doing this together?
She didn’t type that either.
Yesterday, all of this fitted into one action: send him the draft.
Today, it needed unpacking.
She started typing:
“I was just trying to save us some time.”
Looked at it. Deleted it.
She’d saved herself a morning.
She might have just scheduled him a professional identity crisis.
Best not to call that “us”.
The awkward part was that she didn’t want to go back to the old pace.
She didn’t want another meeting for three clarifications. To wait for a file. To reconcile versions. To write “just a gentle reminder” when nothing happening inside her was remotely gentle.
“Just a gentle reminder” is usually written by someone who has already shaken you by the shoulders in their head.
She liked working quickly.
She liked getting a result while the idea was still alive.
And she liked her colleague.
Until this morning, those two feelings had coexisted quite happily.
Now one of them was requesting access to the document.
She opened his comments on their previous work.
In one, he’d caught a wrong number. In another, he’d asked a question that led them to rewrite half the proposal. Then there was the project where he’d calmly spoken to the client while she was preparing a reply of magnificent accuracy and catastrophic consequence.
He wasn’t useless.
That would have been far too convenient.
But trusting him with a task now meant agreeing to wait.
And she already knew how much she could get done in that time.
You could say he should use AI too.
Probably.
But then they’d have to work out why there were two of them.
Does one brief while the other checks? Do they own separate parts? Take on twice the work? Who speaks to the client, who makes the decisions, who notices that they’ve both done a splendid job of automating something entirely unnecessary?
And who starts that conversation?
Especially when one person is already delighted with the progress, and the other has only just discovered he’s part of the experiment.
She’d learnt to delegate the tasks. Their relationship wasn’t in the instructions.
At 10:17, the client replied.
“Thanks, this all looks good. Could we get the next batch this quickly too?”
In the next window, her colleague’s message was still open.
“You could have at least shown me.”
Two people were waiting for an answer.
Without thinking, she opened the chatbot.
“Help me phrase…”
She stopped.
How do you work together now, when even the conversation about it feels easier to start without him?