06/16/2026
"So… What Is It You Actually Do Here?"
(Note: I did use AI to create the image.. a bit ironic?)
The Bobs have arrived. They're just not who you expected.
If you've seen Office Space, you remember the Bobs.
Two efficiency consultants. Matching khakis. Clipboard energy. They show up, pull employees into a conference room one by one, and ask the most quietly terrifying question in corporate history:
"What would you say… you do here?"
It was satire in 1999. It's a business model in 2026.
Except the Bobs aren't consultants anymore. They don't drink bad coffee in your breakroom or ask about your TPS reports. They don't need parking validation.
They're AI systems. And they're already in the building.
The awkward part? They're asking better questions than the original Bobs ever did.
The original Bobs mostly shuffled paper and justified their own existence. The new Bobs are actually doing the work — writing the code, summarizing the calls, generating the reports, analyzing the data, drafting the emails — and somewhere in between tasks, they're quietly logging: does this step require a human?
Spoiler: a lot of steps don't.
We're watching it happen in real time. Tech companies — the same ones that told us AI would "augment" workers — have laid off tens of thousands of people in the last 18 months. Not because business is bad. Because the math changed. One AI system doing the work of six engineers isn't a headline anymore. It's a quarterly earnings call talking point.
The robots aren't coming for your job. They already submitted their pull request.
And here's where it gets genuinely strange: unlike the Bobs — who were famously bad at their jobs — the AI Bobs are disturbingly good at theirs. They don't get distracted. They don't need one-on-ones. They don't have opinions about the office thermostat. They produce. Constantly. At scale. For fractions of the cost.
Which means the question isn't really "will AI take jobs?" — that ship has sailed, hit an iceberg, and the iceberg is also AI.
The real question is: what answer do you have ready when the new Bobs call you into the conference room?
Because "I handle the TPS reports" is not going to cut it.
The people who are thriving right now aren't the ones trying to out-produce AI. They're the ones who figured out what AI genuinely can't do — build real relationships, ask uncomfortable questions, navigate ambiguity, make judgment calls that require actual stakes, communicate in ways that feel human because they are.
In other words: the people who can articulate their value clearly, specifically, and fast.
Which, if you think about it, is exactly what the Bobs were asking all along.
We just never thought we'd have to take the question seriously.
Peter Gibbons got lucky. He didn't have to answer the Bobs — the building burned down. We probably shouldn't count on that.
The new efficiency review is happening whether you schedule it or not. The question is whether you're ready for it.
What is it you do here?
I write about the intersection of technology, work, and what it means to build something in an era when the rules keep changing. If this resonated, follow along — and let me know in the comments: what's your answer to the Bobs?
