Everyone's exhausted hearing the word AI. It's in every memo, every excuse for why headcount keeps shrinking. Fine. Let's actually use it, then. Not to write emails faster. To see the picture clearly.
We used it to pull profit numbers back to the year this company formed. Not a single loss year in over two decades.
We used it to compare executive pay against the exact years benefits got cut.
We used it to see that severance costs are often a fraction of what gets paid out in dividends in a matter of weeks.
We used it to understand who stock buybacks actually benefit, and it is not the person worried about their next paycheck.
We used it to recognize known corporate playbooks: titles structured to strip organizing rights, restructuring that lines up with headcount targets already decided.
We used it to confirm national union density has been eroding for seventy years, and we're living the tail end of it.
We used it to separate real savings from cost shifting, franchise conversions and rehire-at-a-lower-rate schemes that look like savings but are wage suppression with extra steps.
None of this required insider access. It's all public, buried under enough jargon that reading it feels like a second job.
So if they're going to hand us the tool and tell us to use it or get left behind, use it. Educate yourself on the company you actually work for. Don't take what they hand you in a rally with the claps and the p-m poms as the whole picture. Pull the numbers. Pull the board backgrounds. Pull the org chart changes. Do the research yourself, not because someone told you what to think, but because you finally can see it for yourself.
Once enough of us see the same picture, at the same time, the direction gets a lot less complicated.