Between You and AI

5Augmentation

IMAGINE WAKING UP every day to the same alarm, in the same bed, hearing the same song on the radio. You move through the motions—brushing your teeth, grabbing your usual coffee, driving the usual route to work. You see the same people at work, answer the same emails, sit through the same meetings. The day ends, and it feels like you’ve already lived it.

At first, it’s frustrating. Then, numbing. Eventually, you stop noticing it altogether. You are stuck in a loop—performing, producing, executing—but never truly progressing.

In the 1993 classic Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays a cynical weatherman who finds himself in that exact scenario: trapped in time, reliving the same day over and over again. The loop only begins to break when he stops going through the motions and starts reimagining what the day could be—not as something simply to endure. Nothing changes until he does.

It is a comedy, sure—but it also captures something deeply familiar: the soul-crushing weight of repetition. That feeling that we are busy, that we do a lot of things—not always the right ones and not the ones that elevate us—and that, deep down, we are stuck.

We get so used to this repetition that we do not even notice it. There is a deceptively simple question I often ask my MBA students, and now I ask you: “When was the last time you did something for the first time at work?” When was the last time you truly stepped away from your processes, habits, and routines and actually did something ...