The public conversation about AI is dominated by cheerleaders and doomers. Both camps are loud. Neither is very useful when you're trying to decide whether to use AI on a Monday morning.
Most working Lean people I talk to sit somewhere quieter than either camp. They've tried things. They've kept some, dropped others. They have a short list of things they won't use AI for at all. They're not impressed by demos and they're not panicked by headlines.
I want to hear from those people.
I posted a one-question poll on LinkedIn this week, and it's still open for a few more days. The question:
“Lean professionals: where do you actually sit on AI in your work today?”
The four options:
- Excited – using it daily
- Curious – still exploring
- Skeptical – watching closely
- Worried – it threatens my work
The poll is closed, but you can still join the discussion.
I'm not sharing the running results yet. I'd rather you answer it cold, without anchoring to what other people have said. I'll come back and share the numbers, with some reflection, after the poll closes.
Here are the final results:
462 people voted. A few things stood out.
Half of them – 51% – put themselves in the “excited, using it daily” group. I had expected “curious, still exploring” to be the largest, and it came in second at 36%.
The worried camp barely registered: 2%. I'd be careful reading too much into that one, though. A poll like this doesn't sample the whole field. The people most worried about AI may be the same ones who scroll past an AI poll without voting. Self-selection probably understates the worry here, so I'd treat 2% as a floor, not a finding.
Put the excited and curious groups together and it's almost nine in ten voters either using AI daily or still exploring it. The skeptics and the worried make up the rest. That doesn't describe a field standing still.
The Comments Are Where the Signal Is
A poll like this gives you a single data point per person. It doesn't tell you what people are actually doing with AI — or refusing to do with it. The comments are where the interesting material lives.
Three things I'd love you to weigh in on:
What's earning its keep? Where has AI quietly become a dependable part of your work? Not a demo, not a one-time experiment — something you'd actually miss if it disappeared tomorrow.
What did you try and abandon? Which use cases sounded promising but didn't survive contact with your real work, your real customers, your real data?
What do you refuse to use it for? This might be the most interesting one. Where have you drawn a line — on ethical grounds, quality grounds, accuracy grounds, or just because the trade-off isn't worth it to you?
You can comment on the LinkedIn post, or here on the blog if you'd prefer. Anonymous comments are fine on the blog, if there's something you'd rather not say under your name on LinkedIn.
I'll read every comment. With permission, I may quote some of them (anonymously if you want) in a follow-up post when the poll closes.
Why the Middle Matters
The cheerleader-versus-doomer framing has another problem beyond the noise. It misses where the most interesting decisions are actually being made right now.
The people I learn the most from aren't the loudest voices. They're the ones running small experiments. Comparing notes with colleagues. Noticing where the tool helps and where it quietly gets in the way. That's a Lean habit more than an AI habit — go and see, run a PDSA, be honest about what you observed, don't fall in love with any particular tool.
That's also what I've been trying to do with my own AI Lean Coach that you can use. The healthcare version is grounded in Lean Hospitals and both are built with explicit guardrails. Respect for People is foundational. Safety, Quality, Delivery, and Cost have to go hand in hand. Mistakes are system feedback rather than moral failings. Lean is never “done.”
I built it because the generic AI tools were giving people confidently wrong Lean advice on questions like “how do I use Lean to reduce headcount?” I wrote about that test in more detail in this post. I wanted a coach that would push back on a bad framing instead of dressing it up in nicer language. It's still an experiment. I'm still learning what it does well and where it falls short — which is part of why I'm so curious what other Lean people are finding.
If you've been doing that kind of experimentation with AI — in any direction, including “I tried it and it wasn't for me” — I want to hear from you.
What are you seeing? What are you doing?
