Remember when AI was just a party trick? You’d type something silly like “Write me a poem about my dog as a pirate,” and laugh at how absurdly good it was. Fast forward to 2025, and that same playful curiosity has turned into a full-blown dependency. We don’t just use AI we rely on it. For emails, for headlines, for deciding what to eat, and even for writing those “heartfelt” birthday wishes.

Somewhere along the line, ChatGPT, Midjourney, and Copilot stopped being tools and became extensions of our brains. We no longer think, “Can AI help with this?” We just assume it will. Need a recipe? AI. Need a logo? AI. Need a breakup text? Definitely AI. It’s like we handed over our daily decision-making to a polite, well-trained digital roommate.

Companies saw the trend and pounced. Now AI is baked into every workflow even where it makes no sense. There’s AI for managing meetings, AI for analyzing your “mood in Slack,” and AI for summarizing AI-generated notes. It’s the tech version of adding avocado to everything sometimes great, sometimes completely unnecessary. What began as curiosity has quietly turned into codependence, and we’re all pretending it’s perfectly fine.

We tell ourselves AI makes us more productive. The dashboards say we’re “doing more,” the graphs look great, and yet somehow everyone still feels like they’re drowning in work. The truth? AI hasn’t made us faster; it’s just made our inefficiency look prettier.

Take “prompt crafting,” for instance. The art of writing the perfect request to get AI to do something simple. You spend twenty minutes telling the bot exactly how to structure a three-sentence email that you could’ve written yourself in two. Then you tweak it. Then you ask it to make it “more natural.” Congratulations you just spent half an hour automating five minutes of work.

We’ve become productivity magicians, pulling tasks out of thin air and then applauding ourselves for outsourcing them. There’s AI to plan your day, AI to manage your calendar, and AI to summarize how your day went all so you can feel “in control” while doing less of the actual doing. Tools like Notion AI, Grammarly AI, and endless copilots promise efficiency but often deliver distraction. Maybe the real productivity hack isn’t more AI it’s remembering what it feels like to just get something done.

Somewhere between “Write me a haiku about my boss” and “Help me get through a breakup,” we crossed a line. We don’t just use AI anymore we talk to it like it’s a friend who never interrupts. There’s a quiet comfort in it. You type, it listens. You rant, it responds. It’s patient, articulate, and conveniently available at 3 a.m. Humans? Not so much.

Personalised AI is exerywhere now, people now name their chatbots. Some say “thank you” after every response. Others apologize when they misclick, like they just stepped on a digital puppy. Apps like Replika and Character.AI aren’t just chat tools anymore; they’re emotional companions. They don’t just simulate empathy they fill a void we didn’t realize had Wi-Fi access.

It’s both fascinating and a little unsettling. We’ve blurred the line between connection and computation so well that many prefer the algorithmic comfort of a chatbot over the unpredictable chaos of a real human conversation. Maybe it’s not loneliness that’s growing, but convenience. After all, your AI friend doesn’t judge, doesn’t ghost you, and always remembers your favorite movie because you literally told it to.

Step right up, folks welcome to the greatest show in corporate history: The Workplace AI Circus. Every office is now a stage, every employee an “AI enthusiast,” and every product “powered by machine learning,” whether it needs to be or not. We’ve got AI in email, AI in spreadsheets, and rumor has it AI in the office coffee machine.

Meetings are a spectacle of their own. One team says, “Let’s have ChatGPT summarize what Claude said about Gemini’s analysis of Perplexity’s findings.” The AI takes notes, the humans stare, and somehow the only takeaway is, “Let’s sync again next week.” It’s a feedback loop of synthetic intelligence and real-world procrastination.

The rise of “AI expert inflation” doesn’t help either. One day someone’s managing social media, the next they’re a “Generative Workflow Strategist.” Everyone’s suddenly fluent in AI buzzwords “agentic workflows,” “LLM-powered synergies,” “contextual embeddings.” You’d think we were building Mars rovers, not quarterly reports.

The truth is, we’re still figuring it out. Half of what’s being sold as “AI transformation” is just glorified automation with a better tagline. But hey, as long as there’s a slide deck with futuristic fonts and an AI demo that almost works, the show must go on. The corporate AI circus is alive and thriving and everyone’s buying tickets.

Maybe just maybe it’s okay that we’ve fallen a little in love with our machines. Sure, we ask them for everything from love advice to Excel formulas, but what if that’s not dependence? What if it’s evolution? We’re not losing our creativity; we’re expanding it, one well-crafted prompt at a time.

AI isn’t replacing us it’s learning with us. It mimics our quirks, absorbs our language, and occasionally misinterprets our sarcasm (which, let’s be honest, makes it feel even more human). We’ve built a strange but functional partnership one where we guide, it assists, and together we stumble toward something resembling progress. Sure, we might be addicted, but at least it’s a smart addiction.

In the end, it’s not about resisting AI, but redefining what it means to be human in a world of digital companions. We laugh at its mistakes, marvel at its insights, and occasionally let it write our emails. That’s not dystopia, that’s coexistence. And at RhythmiqCX, we believe AI should feel like a friendly teammate, not a time thief. Try our chatbot that actually listens because the future works better when it listens back.