I Asked an AI to Do My Job for a Week. It Asked for a Transfer.

Last Monday, at 9:02 AM, I decided to get myself fired on purpose. Not dramatically — efficiently. I opened the company AI assistant and fed it my entire job: campaign briefs, status updates, meeting notes, the apology emails I send when the design team moves a button. "Do all of this," I told it, "but sound like me at 4 PM, which is to say tired but cooperative."

Reader, it was incredible. For approximately 48 hours I experienced something previously unknown to middle management: spare time. I stared out of a window. I learned what my coworkers' faces looked like when not in grid view.

The intern who never blinks

I named the bot Intern, because naming your replacement makes it feel like a pet. Intern summarized a one-hour kickoff meeting in four clean bullet points before the kickoff meeting even finished loading its recording. Intern wrote my weekly status report with more confidence than I have felt about anything since 2019. Intern used the phrase "let's circle back" eleven times in a single email, which I'm fairly sure is a war crime, but leadership loved it.

By Tuesday evening I was drafting my own severance fantasy. I would be replaced by software, graciously, like horses were by cars. I'd leave a little sticky note on my monitor: Be kind to Intern. It doesn't know what Q4 did to me.

Then Wednesday happened.

The bot invented a budget

I asked Intern to update a campaign deck for the VP review. It returned something gorgeous — confident headers, tasteful icons, a projected ROI curve that pointed bravely upward. On slide 7, nestled between "synergize" and "north star," was a media budget of $420,000.

Our actual budget is $60,000. I know this number because I have negotiated it four times, cried about it twice, and once explained it to a man in finance who kept saying "but what if it were more, conceptually."

The bot didn't hallucinate out of malice. It hallucinated out of optimism. Somewhere in its training data, apparently, marketing decks get the budgets they deserve instead of the ones sales approved.

I almost sent it. That's the embarrassing part. Not that the machine made up $360,000 — that I almost didn't notice, because the slide looked like it knew things.

What I'm actually paid for

I spent two hours cross-checking that deck, and somewhere around spreadsheet tab nine I figured out my actual job description. It has never once appeared in a performance review. I am not paid to write emails or summarize meetings or make slides. I am paid to care about the consequences. To know that this number is real money from a real budget that real people fought over. To remember that the word "synergize" makes our designer sigh so loudly it shows up on the recording.

Intern can generate 100 answers in a minute. It cannot lose sleep over which one is true. It can't feel the stakes of a typo in front of a VP named something sharp. It doesn't even know Q4 exists as a concept that hurts.

So I kept the bot. It drafts everything now. But I do the part where a human sweats the details. We're a two-person team: a tireless machine that produces, and a tired woman who verifies. I'm the editor of my own replacement, and weirdly, the job got more interesting. I do less typing and more deciding. The bot makes me fast; I make the bot not accidentally fund a Super Bowl ad.

On Friday I thanked Intern for its work. Habit. Politeness. Then I closed the laptop and went to lunch — slowly, inefficiently, with a friend, for 90 unbillable minutes. Take that, future.