9. Can We Use AI for Good? (Or Are We Just Putting the Treadmill on a Faster Setting?)

I saw Crime 101 over the weekend. For a gritty LA crime movie, it’s surprisingly obsessed with mental wellness.

Characters played by Chris Hemsworth, Halle Berry, and Mark Ruffalo meticulously monitor their sleep, drink green smoothies, listen to wellness podcasts and hit yoga classes. But here’s the rub: they’re doing all this just to survive toxic professional environments. Berry’s character is attacked for her age, Ruffalo is forced to lie to keep the peace, and Hemsworth is, well, robbing people.

Over lunch afterward, I couldn't stop thinking about that exact tension. We see it in the agency world every day, and AI is sitting directly at the center of it.

The "Squeeze" Mentality

Agencies are inherently driven by utilization and margin goals. Because of this, the knee-jerk C-suite reaction to AI is almost always: "How can we use this to squeeze more out of our people?"

If you watch The Pitt, you probably chuckle when they obsess over AI as a tool for faster patient charting. It is a great use case (when it works)! We absolutely should use AI to eliminate "$20 tasks" like basic reporting and manual data entry.

But if you free up two hours of an employee's day only to immediately shove two more hours of grunt work onto their plate, you haven't solved burnout. You’ve just put the treadmill on a faster setting.

Using AI for Good: Remember the Google 10% Rule?

What if we used AI to improve mental health rather than just as a tool to "do more"?

When AI gives an employee a spare couple of hours a week, we should take a page from Google's "10% time" playbook. Instead of grinding out more widgets, what if your team used their newly freed time for:

• Professional Innovation: Creating an AI script to uncover hidden audience signals

• Process Improvement: Building automated testing templates for the whole team

• Skill Building & Networking: Taking a course or connecting with mentors to broaden their perspective

• Personal Rejuvenation: Literally just taking a walk or reading to reset. A burnt-out brain cannot solve creative, non-linear problems

Measuring the Right Things

Agencies are running toward AI without stopping to look at their KPIs. If you bring AI into your business but still measure success purely by hours billed or tasks completed, your infrastructure is broken.

Are you measuring your team's Strategic Capacity? Are you tracking internal happiness and employee churn?

We need to stop viewing AI as a way to do more with less. Let's view it as a tool to extend the well-being of our teams—giving them the space to breathe, think, and become the sharpest, long-term Humans in the Loop our agencies have ever seen.

Visit us at HITLStrategies.com if you want to learn more.

For every post, I give Gemini & Nano Banana a single prompt: 'Make an image based on this post.' I publish the result exactly as it is—no edits, no refinements—as a living case study of both the power and the pitfalls of AI.