The floor got lowered—now it’s flooding

Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index, based on data from 20,000 workers, finds that AI has lowered the floor of what anyone can produce to near zero while raising the ceiling of what the best work can achieve, creating a flood of passable content. Meta VP Jagjit Chawla reports receiving five 50-page decks per week built in 30 minutes each, making judgment and taste the rare skills that determine which work deserves to exist.

A product manager I know got a four-word message from her boss last month: “Do more with less.” She had the AI https://www.fastcompany.com/section/artificial-intelligence tools. She had a shrinking deadline. She also had a kind of dread. She is good at her job. She works hard. And she is watching that job change shape while she is still doing it. That feeling is everywhere right now, and SaaS leaders in B2C and B2B are both sensing and naming it. John Maeda leads design and AI at Microsoft. His mantra is simple, and he shared it in a podcast: Lower the floor, raise the ceiling https://www.linkedin.com/posts/johnmaeda floor-vs-ceiling-jon-paris-recently-reminded-activity-7467982018027589632-fGVd/ . Jagjit Chawla runs Feed, Reels, and Search at Meta as a VP of product management. He says nearly the same thing https://theskip.substack.com/p/how-meta-is-reinventing-product-management . AI lowers the floor of what you can try. It raises the ceiling of what you can reach. Then Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/agents-human-agency-and-the-opportunity-for-every-organization , its big annual report, opened with a section titled “AI lifts the ceiling on individual potential.” Same idea, now backed by data from 20,000 workers. Two leaders and a research report, all pointing the same way. That usually means something real is underneath. Here is the plain version. The floor is the baseline, the work anyone can reach with a prompt. The ceiling is the best the work can be, the version that makes someone stop and pay attention. AI moved both. It dropped the floor close to zero. It pushed the ceiling higher than ever. The floor dropped so low that anyone can reach it. So everyone does. “Do more with less” turns into “make more, faster.” And the inbox starts to flood. Chawla feels it already. He said in the podcast that he gets five 50-page decks a week, each one built in 30 minutes by someone chatting with a tool. He calls himself the bottleneck. The water keeps rising. The flood all looks the same. Paul Bakaus, who builds design tools for AI and is CEO of Renaissance Geek, said it well. “ Passable is now the baseline https://impeccablestyle.substack.com/p/impeccable-is-now-a-company-and-i , and passable all looks the same.” You know the look: the AI email; the AI slide; the AI landing page. Smooth, competent, forgettable. When everyone can make it in a minute, it stops being worth much. So the value floated up. It moved to the ceiling. The ceiling is the part only a person can reach. Microsoft’s data says the same thing. The workers getting the most from AI spend their time on judgment, on taste, and on deciding what is worth doing at all. For Chawla, making the deck is the easy part now. The rare skill is knowing which deck deserves to exist. Who the stakeholders are. What they care about. How to get them aligned and move the thing forward. None of that comes from a prompt. Think of AI as leverage. It takes the cheap, repeatable work off your plate. That frees you for the relationships, the influence, and the hard calls that need a human in the room. So here is how you improve your organization’s output. Get your team to build, Ensure your team understands that the floor is easy to get to. Use the tools until the floor work takes minutes. Then take that saved time and spend it up high. On the judgment. On the taste. On the one part of the work that is clearly yours. And as a leader, watch what you do with that saved time. Microsoft’s report found that the environment around people matters about twice as much as their own effort. Managers who make room to experiment get far more out of their teams. So hold some open space for your people. Pouring the saved time straight back into more output just raises the water. The floor is everyone’s now. The flood is coming for the average. Floating is the job. Anubhav Rohatgi is senior director of products at Adobe.