From a February 2026 conversation between AlignIQ co-founders Dan Garmat and Caroline Stauss about new Harvard Business Review research on AI and workload.
Public debate about AI circles job replacement. This clip looks at a nearer risk the research points to: expectation inflation.
Key takeaways
- Ask whether the risk is that AI replaces people, or that it changes what we expect from them.
- Expectations rise in small steps. Someone handles a task outside their role with AI’s help, so they’re asked again next time.
- That gradual expansion of scope is a risk leaders have to manage on purpose.
Try this with your team
List three tasks someone on your team has taken on since they started using AI. Were those added on purpose, and did anything come off their plate?
Going further
AI Leadership Calibration helps leaders set workload and trust norms as AI changes the job.
Sources mentioned
More from this series
Transcript
Lightly edited from YouTube’s automatic captions for readability. Wording and order are the speakers’ own.
Is the real risk that AI replaces people, or that it changes what we expect from them? I don’t know if that’s a question.
And they talked about this factor of expectations rising. It happens in specific ways: the expectations quietly grow. If you ask someone to do something outside their normal tasks, all of a sudden they’re able to do it, so you might ask them again next time. I think this quiet expansion of expectations is a real risk.
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