Vibing is not the way.

Microsoft just launched "vibe working" in Excel and Word. Now, I’m not clairvoyant but I can tell you there are scores of Microsoft employees Captain-Picard-level facepalming today.

This insane timing couldn't be more perfect. Just last week, Harvard Business Review published, AI-Generated "Workslop" Is Destroying Productivity, a big story on how "vibe working" is turning into a huge problem. HBR explains it clearly:

Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts, this content is often referred to as “AI slop.” In the context of work, we refer to this phenomenon as “workslop.” We define workslop as AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.

Workslop uniquely uses machines to offload cognitive work to another human being. When coworkers receive workslop, they are often required to take on the burden of decoding the content, inferring missed or false context. A cascade of effortful and complex decision-making processes may follow, including rework and uncomfortable exchanges with colleagues.

Now look at Microsoft's vision: An Excel spreadsheet with a flyout window showing the user asking Co-Pilot: "Run a full analysis on this dataset. I want to understand some important insights to help me make decisions about my business. Make it visual!"

Allow me to translate: "Heeeyyy Clippy, I can't be bothered to review this well-organized data complete with pivot tables, so tell me what it means. Oh, and, uh, show me don’t tell me, yah? Ain’t nobody got time to read words. #blessedoffice365"

You can literally picture the robot bro—I'll call him a Robro—checking out his hair, mentally high-fiving himself, while daydreaming about how smart he's going to look and sound in the next meeting with his visualizations. And then the eye rolling and sighing by the poor schmucks under Robro who just added hours to their week because someone has to unfuck his vibing so the entire department doesn't get flagged for the next round of Minimum Viable Human layoffs. Nice work Microsoft Marketing—way to read the ro…oh, wait, what am I talking about! You silly gooses don't read, you prefer visualizations.

Look, the word "vibe" has no place at work or in it. If you want to vibe something then find a club at 2AM, slam a few Red Bulls, and knock yourself out. Because vibe anything—coding, analyzing, prioritizing, strategizing, designing, problem-solving—doesn't make anything more efficient, it just shifts the work elsewhere, and often on the people who are already buried as it is. Using AI as a vending machine will always produce the same result: workslop aka generic shit. In addition, using it this way—like what Microsoft is selling—leads to a reduction in cognitive functions.

Marketing departments love AI because they can make all sorts of claims that will never undergo any kind of scrutiny or compliance review. The marketing folks at IBM had a crazy lust for Watson. Boy howdy the stories they told about what their robot wonder could do. Their efforts simultaneously set expectations that could not be met while also pushing away long-time clients who needed truth and trust instead of glitz and glam.

Ten years ago I took the Chief Innovation Officer of a very large IBM client through a Watson “innovation lab" that featured the very latest in AI-enhanced experiences. When we were through, the lab director asked what he thought and I'll never forget his response: "This is all very interesting and exciting, but what my stores need the most right now is a fresh coat of paint and more hangers."

Swing and a miss.

So unless you're in the business of getting dumb and dumber or maybe you're hiring out zombies for Halloween, then it's time to drop the machine dreams. Start building human-centered first principles and practices around when and how to use AI. The bar is pretty low right now given all of the crap that's out there, so it doesn't have to take much at the moment. But it does require an honest start. And that starts with indexing on humans, not hype—building systems that amplify human intelligence instead of replacing it with passable-looking garbage that creates more work than it solves.