My boss wants AI everywhere

You are not anti-progress. You are the person whose name ends up on the project if it doesn't work—and your boss may well be under pressure you may not see. Board decks, customer RFPs, competitor headlines, maybe a conference where everyone else said "AI-first." For them, the word AI is sometimes shorthand for "we are not falling behind." For you, it is a commitment your team will be asked to honor six months from now when the buzzwords have cooled, the maintenance challenges are real, and you're holding the responsibilities on top of your day job.

That gap is political before it is technical. Marketing wants visionary workflows and data-driven decisions. Sales wants a story that survives procurement. Your boss wants to look innovative, growth oriented and decisive. You want to protect the team's credibility and your own sanity. Nobody is really wrong here—you're all just driving different priorities on the same calendar.

The reframe that may help: when someone says "put AI on it," translate "What decision should be faster, cheaper, or clearer if we do this well?" If there is no answer, say it kindly but clearly. "I can help once we know the outcome we are buying. Right now we are buying language, and language has a delivery date attached to it."

Then offer a ladder. Pick one use case—something with an owner, a date, and a way to know it worked. Frame it as making the narrative true, not smaller: "If we want to keep saying this to customers, here is the one place we can back it up in the next ninety days." Leaders who need the slide often accept that trade when it is presented as credibility insurance, not resistance.

Then watch the political dynamics. The loudest enthusiasm is not always the person who will fund the work. The quiet nod from finance or legal may matter more than the standing ovation in the all-hands. If you are the builder, your political capital is trust: with your team, with peers who have been burned by vaporware before, and with leaders who need someone to tell them the truth without embarrassing them in public. Spend it carefully. A private "here is what we can honestly claim by Q3" conversation beats a public "that will never work" every time.

You are allowed to hate the theater, but it is also a great place to leverage your position and willingness to learn. Protect your craft by narrowing what you own: "I will own what touches customers and engineering reality. I need help saying no to the rest, or we will all look foolish together." Humor helps. So does keeping calm. Progress is actually the change in how decisions get made and in sharing your journey in a way that helps everyone learn with you. That is leadership, even if your title does not say so yet.