Asus presents MyExpert, an AI platform intended to bring document work, information searches, meeting support, writing and email into one environment. The surrounding workplace discussion concerns Generation Z and the idea that better digital tools can help engage younger employees.
At the suggestion that an unexciting task now requires another intelligent companion, my instinct is to send them out digging. Rare earths, preferably: at least the absurdity would complete the notebook supply chain.
There is something profoundly irritating about turning every difficulty in the workplace into evidence that somebody needs another product. The employee is bored, the manager is puzzled, and the supplier arrives with a solution whose remarkable feature is that it can be purchased.
The managers spoke. Then the catalogue opened.
The Asus and Ipsos Doxa research surveyed 400 first- and second-level managers aged 35 to 65. It did not interrogate an entire generation. Among those managers, 34% regarded younger employees as poorly motivated by repetitive tasks, while 68% believed they expected workplace digital capabilities comparable to those on their personal devices.
Those are managerial perceptions. They do not prove that every young employee refuses to work without the latest software. They also do not prove that buying a platform will solve the problem described.
The commercial transition is what deserves attention. A discussion about motivation, expectations and intergenerational friction leads towards MyExpert, which combines local processing with cloud services. A complicated human relationship becomes an opportunity to update the equipment.
No conspiracy is necessary. The sales logic is perfectly visible. If lack of enthusiasm can be framed as inadequate technology, the supplier has a route into the conversation before anyone has established what is actually wrong.
A worker or a customer waiting to be entertained?
What conception of the employee sits behind this pitch? Someone expected to acquire competence, contribute and tolerate the ordinary frustrations of doing a job? Or a consumer whose interest must be continuously renewed by the interface?
Work includes tasks that are not personally thrilling. That is not an extraordinary discovery requiring a generational theory. Knowing how to use an application does not exempt anyone from understanding the activity the application supports. Nor does a recent birth date turn every tedious responsibility into an affront.
The thing that makes me angry is not an attempt to remove pointless manual work. It is the easy slide from useful equipment to institutionalised pampering: perhaps people will engage if we surround them with enough assistance. At what point does the organisation expect them to learn, judge and carry responsibility without a product whispering encouragement?
When a generation is marketed as digitally capable, that claim should create expectations of competence, not an endless invoice for the tools required to keep it interested.
The people selling the nursery
The suppliers are not innocent spectators in this story. They decide how to frame the problem their product supposedly addresses. Describe younger workers as a challenge that technology can soothe and you have built a market around their alleged inability to tolerate the workplace.
I would give that pitch an award for treason against human intelligence. Not because document tools are forbidden, but because infantilisation is being offered as progress. We are apparently empowering people by assuming that their willingness to work needs a software accessory.
MyExpert may organise particular activities. It does not establish why a person should care about doing them well. A meeting assistant can process material; it cannot supply the missing reason to take a meeting seriously. Drafting an email and exercising judgement about what should be said are not the same achievement.
The cost of confusing them is a workplace in which everybody can produce more output while responsibility remains somebody else’s department.
Follow the enthusiasm
The rare-earth digging image is a deliberately ugly reversal of this glossy story. Behind the effortless digital experience sits a physical supply chain. Meanwhile, the sales narrative invites us to believe that tolerating ordinary office work requires ever more technological cushioning.
I am not impressed by that idea of progress. It flatters the employee as a special consumer, flatters the manager as an innovator and leaves the supplier holding the purchase order. Understanding the actual job seems to be the least fashionable part of the arrangement.
We set out to discover who needed more motivation. The sales department appears to be doing just fine.
Raffaele Di Marzio
All my “insane” books on cybersecurity and governance are here 👇 https://www.amazon.it/stores/author/B0FB47T6Q4/allbooks