098 – AI, Human Thinking, and the Future of Work (with Alex Gris)
AI is getting faster and more capable by the week — but that doesn’t automatically make our work better, our thinking sharper, or our organizations healthier. In this episode, host Tim Borys talks with Alex Gris, a senior engineering leader at Google and former CTO, about the gap between individual AI productivity gains and genuine organizational value.
Alex offers a grounded, technically credible perspective on why so many AI initiatives stall: deployed narrowly instead of across full workflows, unchecked “AI slop” quietly overloading a team’s most capable people, and a growing tendency to outsource judgment that should stay firmly human. The conversation lands on a reassuring, practical note — AI transformation isn’t a fundamentally new problem. It’s change management, systems thinking, and leadership fundamentals, applied to a faster-moving technology than we’ve seen before.