This week Jenni Field and Chuck Gose cover four stories dominating the workplace conversation right now — from whether AI is truly transforming organisations or just repeating history's mistakes, to why the more you talk about culture, the less anyone believes you.

McKinsey is calling AI agents the biggest organisational shift since the Industrial Revolution, with teams of two to five people potentially supervising 50 to 100 AI agents. Jenni draws a direct parallel to the Industrial Revolution itself — arguing we're making the same mistake: doing a straight lift-and-shift of people to agents, rather than fundamentally reimagining what work looks like. The real question isn't how many agents replace how many people. It's what work even means.

Bruce Daisley, former VP at Twitter EMEA and author of The Joy of Work, presents a provocative thesis backed by a striking number — 72% of formal culture change initiatives produce no meaningful improvement in trust, engagement, or retention. Jenni connects this to the ongoing culture vs. behaviour debate: culture has become a big word without much meaning, and the proof is always in the pudding. If leaders aren't showing up differently, no amount of values posters will cut through.

The Economist is asking whether the PDF will survive the AI revolution — and the answer is genuinely uncertain. Over 2.5 trillion PDFs exist, LLMs regularly struggle to read them accurately, and one in five email-based cyber attacks are routed through PDF attachments. For comms and HR professionals, this hits close to home — employee handbooks, policies, and benefits guides are often locked inside a format that AI-powered tools can't reliably process. Jenni points out she was having this exact same conversation 15 years ago when digital workplaces first arrived. Nobody owned the problem then. Nobody owns it now.

Block, the parent of Square, Cash App, and Afterpay, is cutting its workforce from over 10,000 to just under 6,000. CEO Jack Dorsey pointed to AI as the driver and predicted most companies would do the same within a year — a statement that sent the stock up 24%. Chuck and Jenni aren't buying it. They call it AI washing: using AI as cover for a workforce that grew 150% during COVID and never came back down. The profit-per-employee figure tells the real story — quadrupling to north of $2 million means this was already a profitable business. And the entire announcement? Written in lowercase, Chuck is not a fan.

Want to find out more about Chuck Gose's work and ICology - check out the website and how to become a member here: https://www.joinicology.com/

Jenni’s a regular speaker and consultant on leadership credibility and internal communication, you can find out more about how to learn from her and work with her here: https://thejennifield.com/

Articles mentioned in this episode:

• The Agentic Organization: Contours of the Next Paradigm for the AI Era
• The More You Talk About Culture, the Less People Believe You
• The War Against PDFs Is Heating Up (paywall)
• Jack Dorsey Cuts 40% of Block's Workforce and Says Most Companies Will Follow Within a Year

In this episode of Frequency, Jenni Field and Chuck Gose dig into the growing gap between AI ambition and workplace reality — from a company quietly doing the opposite of everyone else, to predictions that stretch credibility, to Friday office attendance figures that tell their own story.

IBM Is Tripling Entry-Level Hiring Because of AI — We’ve heard the warnings that AI will gut entry-level jobs but IBM is going in the opposite direction. They shared that rather than cutting junior roles, they rewrote them. Skip entry-level hiring now and in three to five years, you're poaching mid-level talent from competitors at a 30% premium. Dropbox is making a similar bet, expanding its new graduate programme by 25%. Jenni and Chuck explore what this says about the kind of leadership that thinks beyond the short term, and why nurturing talent will always beat lift-and-shift thinking.

Nearly half of US workers say they have never used AI at work . Daily users sit at just 12% and frequent users at 26%. Overall adoption has flatlined; the growth is coming entirely from people who already use it, using it more. The top barrier to adoption is that people simply can't see how AI applies to what they actually do. Jenni and Chuck explore what that means for training, leadership, and the distinction between using AI and benefiting from it.

Gartner's top communications predictions for 2026 include a headline claim that by 2028, three quarters of employees will rely on chatbots for internal communications — effectively spelling the end of the all-staff email, the town hall, and the intranet banner. Jenni is sceptical, to put it mildly. When she's still talking to organisations wrestling with 15 different SharePoint sites that can't communicate with each other, a two-year timeline to chatbot-dependent internal comms doesn't feel grounded in reality. The prediction that comms teams will use employee digital footprints to personalise messaging also raised eyebrows — not because it's wrong, but because the best organisations have been trying to do exactly that for a decade. Jenni and Chuck also pull out a data point that perhaps deserved more attention: for the second year running, misinformation and disinformation ranked as the top global risk by the World Economic Forum. A skills gap worth taking seriously.

KornFerry data from Placer.ai shows that Friday in-office attendance sits at just 12.4%, compared to 24.3% on Tuesdays and 23.7% on Wednesdays — and this is happening even at companies that have issued five-day return to office mandates. KornFerry calls it an engagement problem. Chuck pushes back: this isn't an employee engagement problem, it's a leadership engagement problem. Jenni adds that without data from before the pandemic, nobody can actually say whether 12.4% on a Friday is good, bad, or completely normal.

Freaking Out This Week Jenni has a big announcement — Comms Reboot is coming to Toronto in June, following a successful first outing with the team at ContactMonkey last year. Tickets for the London event in October are already a third sold. Chuck's freak out is Flyover Festival — the employee comms and culture event in Sioux Falls, South Dakota on August 27th. Registration is now open and tickets are already selling.

Articles and links mentioned in this episode:

• IBM Plans to Triple Entry-Level Hiring Because of AI
• Frequent Use of AI in the Workplace Continued to Rise in Q4
• Gartner’s Top Communications Predictions for 2026
• It’s Friday: Hello, Anyone There?
• ICology's Employee Comms & Culture Flyover Festival
• Comms Reboot in Toronto: Email us at info@redefiningcomms.com for info!

Music by Poet Ali. New episodes every Monday. Subscribe, rate, and review — and share with someone who needs to hear this.