For thirty years, the friction in knowledge work was the stuff facilitators are built for. Alignment. Decision making. Getting the right people in the room and getting them to agree on what’s next.

AI is quietly changing what the friction even is.

When anyone on the team can generate a plausible answer in seconds, the bottleneck moves. It moves to judgment. To trust. To knowing which answer to act on, who’s accountable when it’s wrong, and how to keep the team actually thinking instead of outsourcing the thinking to a model that sounds confident.

That’s the New Friction. It’s not less work for facilitators. It’s different work. And it’s the work that decides whether AI adoption actually lands or stalls out in a pile of abandoned pilots.

This series is where we explore it. One conversation at a time.