Paul Welty, PhD AI, WORK, AND STAYING HUMAN

· business

The future of productivity: Demographic trends and labor shortage

The future of productivity: Demographic trends and labor shortage

Explore how demographic trends and labor shortages are reshaping productivity across industries, revealing challenges and future implications for the workforce.

“Kedrosky and Norlin believe demographic trends will ultimately lead to a drastic decline in overall productivity as industries like retail, manufacturing, and health care struggle to fill open positions. There’s some indication that those trends are, in fact, here to stay. The overall labor force participation rate is still about a percentage point lower than it was in February 2020. In a workforce the size of the U.S.’s that can equal several million workers."—A.I. came at ‘perfect time’ to save the economy, VC says | Fortune

Why customer tools are organized wrong

This article reveals a fundamental flaw in how customer support tools are designed—organizing by interaction type instead of by customer—and explains why this fragmentation wastes time and obscures the full picture you need to help users effectively.

Infrastructure shapes thought

The tools you build determine what kinds of thinking become possible. On infrastructure, friction, and building deliberately for thought rather than just throughput.

Server-side dashboard architecture: Why moving data fetching off the browser changes everything

How choosing server-side rendering solved security, CORS, and credential management problems I didn't know I had.

The work of being available now

A book on AI, judgment, and staying human at work.

The practice of work in progress

Practical essays on how work actually gets done.

Dev reflection - February 20, 2026

I want to talk about the difference between execution and verification. Because something happened this week that made the distinction painfully clear, and I think it matters far beyond software.

Dev reflection - February 18, 2026

There's a moment in any system—a team, a company, a workflow—where the thing you've been optimizing for stops being the constraint. And you don't notice right away. You keep pushing on the old bott...

Dev reflection - February 17, 2026

I want to talk about staging areas. Not the technical kind—the human kind. The places where work goes to sit. The inbox you check before forwarding. The draft folder. The approval queue. The meetin...

The perfect time for a.i.

Discover how A.I. is emerging as a crucial solution to the U.S. labor shortage, reshaping the economy at the perfect moment.

Stop making all the decisions

Overcome decision fatigue by empowering others to share the load and elevate your standards for better outcomes. Discover how today!

AI offers relief from email overload

Transform your email management with AI tools that help triage and compose replies, making remote work more efficient and sustainable.