Every major outsourcing wave promised efficiency gains and punished organizations that treated it as a procurement decision rather than a transformation. AI adoption is the same wave with a different vendor. The transformation activities that separated outsourcing successes from failures map directly onto what AI adoption requires, and most organizations are skipping them.
Black Mirror had an episode where a grieving partner rebuilt a lost loved one as an AI — trained on messages, emails, tone of voice. We watched it as fiction. A tool called Colleague Skill just made the workplace version real. Feed it someone’s chat logs and emails, and it produces an AI that replicates both their technical patterns and communication style. 8,400 GitHub stars in a week. The China context matters, but it’s a symptom. The concept is older and broader: Digital Twins, applied to people. Until now that framing lived in research papers and HR thought-leadership decks. Now it’s a GitHub repo with an install guide: titanwings/colleague-skill. ...