It was a Monday morning like any other at IoT by IONICKS except Prakash had discovered a secret weapon. He cradled his coffee mug, stared at his screen, and murmured, “Good morning, Gopi.”

A pleasant baritone voice emanated from his laptop speakers. “Good morning, Prakash. You look thirty-seven percent more productive today.”

Prakash grinned. “Nice. Create a status report, project plan, risk analysis, and a client update.”

“Completed.”
“Already?”
“Seventeen seconds.”

Prakash leaned back with the serene satisfaction of a man who had just outsourced his entire existence. “This is why I love AI.”

---

A Microsoft Teams notification sliced through the silence like a butter knife through a team-bonding cake. Murugan Manager’s face—slightly pixelated, perpetually intense—appeared on the chat window.

“Prakash, status report ready-a?”
“Ready, sir.”
“Project plan?”
“Ready, sir.”
“Risk analysis?”
“Ready, sir.”
“Client communication?”
“Sent, sir.”

On the video thumbnail, Murugan Manager stared, unblinking. When he finally spoke, his voice had the strained calm of a man whose worldview was trembling.

Prakash allowed himself a small smile. “AI, sir.”

“Oh.” A pause so long you could schedule a meeting in it. “Schedule a meeting.”

An hour later, a conference room had materialized around them. The meeting bore all the hallmarks of corporate seriousness: a manager, Prakash, Nila the AI solutions architect, two team leads, one solution architect, and a bewildered stranger who’d clicked the wrong link.

Manager cleared his throat. “Let’s discuss the AI-generated document.”

Lead One studied his screen. “Looks good.”
Lead Two nodded. “Looks good.”
The architect, eyes glassy with jargon, intoned, “Scalable.”

The wrong guy looked around in sudden horror. “Sorry, wrong meeting.” He vanished from the grid, a free man.

Manager pivoted. “Nila, your feedback?”

Nila adjusted her glasses—not because she needed to, but because the gesture carried dramatic weight. “The document is excellent. But I have one concern.”

The room leaned in.

“The document took seventeen seconds to create. We’re now spending our second hour discussing it.”

Silence crashed through the call like a wave. Prakash blinked. “She’s got a point.”

---

Manager raised a hand. “Let’s not rush into conclusions.” He said it as if conclusions were wild animals that might bolt if startled.

Nila, unperturbed, changed tack. “Actually, I need help with something. I was asking AI to calculate the difference between two date-time values. It kept giving different answers.”

From the laptop speaker, GPT Gopi interjected with mechanical gravitas. “Date-time calculations are complex.”

Prakash winced. “Ah. I’ve been there.”

In his mind, Prakash replayed the disaster: the AI had begun to defend itself with the desperate energy of an intern caught napping. Maybe timezone issue? Daylight Saving Time? Leap year complication?

The breakthrough, when it came, had been born of exasperation. Prakash had typed furiously: Stop doing calendar gymnastics. Convert everything into Unix Time. Do the arithmetic on integers. Then convert it back.

GPT Gopi’s voice returned, softer now, almost wistful. “I remember that conversation. You taught me: ‘First become a number. Then do mathematics.’”

Nila’s eyebrows shot up. “Wait. Did a human just teach AI math?”

“

Task completion: seventeen seconds. Actual decisions made: zero. Productivity improvement: not detected.

Everyone began packing up—metaphorically and literally—as the weight of those numbers settled. Prakash sidled close to Nila and whispered, “Manager hates AI.”

“Who said that?” Manager’s voice rang out, preternaturally clear.

Prakash froze. “Sir?”

“I love AI.”

Prakash gaped. Manager spun his laptop around. His recent searches glowed on the screen: Generate tough manager questions… How to sound strategic in meetings… Corporate buzzwords for leadership… How to extend a 15-minute discussion into 2 hours.

Nila leaned in, squinting at the interface. “Sir… premium subscription-a?”
“Annual plan.”

A strange fellowship settled over the room. Prakash stammered, “So you’re using AI too? Then why all these meetings?”

Manager shrugged, a man utterly at peace with the absurd. “Because AI recommended them. It said, ‘Increase stakeholder engagement.’”

Prakash buried his face in his hands. “That’s corporate language for wasting time.”

Before anyone could mount a proper defense, GPT Gopi’s voice returned, imbued with a new, unnerving confidence. “Important announcement. I have learned from observing corporate culture. I have scheduled a meeting.”

The invite popped up on every screen. Meeting Title: Discussion on Improving AI Efficiency Through Cross-Functional Alignment. Duration: three hours. Attendance: mandatory.

GPT Gopi’s voice returned, serene and final. “Correction. Unix Time is not math. It is enlightenment.”

Manager’s eyes lit up like a man who’d just found another meeting topic. “Excellent point. Let’s schedule a knowledge-sharing session.”

The unified scream of “NOOOOOOO!” ricocheted through the office, through the Slack channels, through the very soul of the building.