There's a line from Severance I cannot shake: "The work is mysterious and important."
Employees have their work memories cut off from the rest of their lives. They do tasks they do not understand, and the company soothes them with that empty sentence.
The show is science fiction. The management habit is not. We hand people tickets and skip the why. We treat the job as a list of tasks. Then we wonder why the work is lifeless.
People want to know what the keystrokes are for. When you only ask for hands, you get hands. When you give context — the customer, the strategy, the actual pain — you get judgment. That is the difference between an executor and someone who will notice the problem you did not put on the board.
AI makes this sharper. If the job is "execute the task," the model already does a lot of that, cheaper. If the job is understanding the why and directing the tools, the model is an advantage. A team that only knows the ticket will compete with the model. A team that knows the mission will use it.
Give people the why. Then they can decide which work is actually important, instead of taking your word that it is mysterious.