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TL;DR
We recently went AI native (get the lowdown here) and handed 50+ Cubies AI capabilities they'd never had before. Being the brilliant bunch they are, they absolutely nerded out on it. With a snap of a finger, they suddenly had an entirely new way of working and the sky was the limit for what they could do.
The old rules and roles had completely changed, so they went right to seeing what was possible in this new proving ground. Spoiler: the limit does not exist. Suddenly it was a flex to screenshot how long you had logged with Claude that day, to fall down a rabbit hole building a solution that wasn’t possible before, to context switch so much Cubies’ eyes were crossed and bleary from riding that optimisation wave too hard.
Then our Head of People, Emillie Fenton, planted herself in the middle of the bridge and went woah woah WOAH.
Because here's what we quickly saw when the initial existential dread abated: the honey trap in a transformation this fast isn't people resisting it. It's people loving it so much they run straight off the edge.
Binge the rest of the series:
Right. The Bridge of Khazad-dûm. Shit gets real.
(Bear with us on the Lord of the Rings for a sec. It lands, pinky promise)
We're deep in the Mines of Moria. The Fellowship are scrambling to GTFO. Behind them: Durin's Bane, a Balrog, a fire demon knocking about since the First Age is making his displeasure known for that fool of a Took disturbing his nap.
Gandalf the Grey stops in the middle of the bridge to be just an overall icon and drop this banger, "You cannot pass." and again for the cheap seats in the back: "YOU SHALL NOT PASS" Staff down, bridge shatters, Balrog drops it like it's hot.
And then the bit that has everyone shooketh and whispering "get away from the edge, G!" The Balrog's whip catches his ankle on the way down and takes him with it. Gone. Adios Gandalf the Grey
(Spoiler: he rocks up later in his new, resurrected, resplendent angelic era)
Gandalf isn't blocking the Fellowship. He's not stopping the quest, slowing the party down, or having a lovely time saying no. He's holding the narrow point so everyone else gets through safe and sound.
That's the job. And that's our Emillie. (or Emdalf as she will be known until the age of man ends on Middle Earth)
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Emillie's been at Cube over four years and covers the whole People umbrella. HR, recruitment, culture, the lot. So when the CEO came in and stripped 17 years of process to the studs, she got the closest possible seat to what that does to actual humans.
Her own day to day changed less than a developer's. Her role in the rebuild was something else entirely.
"As with any kind of huge organisational change, my role is making sure that I was and still am the voice for employees in the room. Like advocating them, making sure wellbeing was at the forefront and comms were considered." Emillie Fenton, Head of People, 3 Sided Cube
First, the bit that actually rattled people
Not redundancy. Everyone assumes redundancy. What actually landed was weirder and much harder to write a comms plan for.
"It was and still is quite the roller coaster of emotions for everyone. It's kind of ranging from, wow, my whole way of working and my whole identity as I work in this role has changed for a lot of people across Cube, which is a huge, huge thing." Emillie Fenton, Head of People, 3 Sided Cube
Identity. That's the word. Not jobs. Identity.
Spend a decade becoming genuinely brilliant at a craft, get told the craft itself is now different, and you don't feel excited. You feel the ground split open. Off the richter as seismic shifts go, and it lands you in an entirely new way of operating whether you're ready or not.
It's the entire reason you need a human on the bridge.
So how did Cubes cope?
By us admitting, out loud and often, that we didn’t have a scooby doo.
Not about the destination. That was already locked and loaded in the GPS and we were flying down the motorway. The actual route to get there was hazy.
"I think if you're doing a huge organisational change, it shouldn't just be decreed from the top. Employees should have the opportunity to voice concerns and give feedback. And even if they can't change the route, just to feel like they have a voice makes a huge amount of difference." Emillie Fenton, Head of People, 3 Sided Cube
Which is basically the Ikea effect with a lanyard on. You love that wonky damn bookshelf because you built it with your own blood, sweat and tears. (If you think that is an overstatement, you didn’t see the state of me after my infamous Battle of the Kallax bookshelf in ‘24)
Emillie fully expected the list lovers to struggle hardest. The this-is-my-role-this-is-my-Bible crowd, thrown into a world with no clean answers.
"I was concerned that those type of people would really struggle in this new environment where we just don't have the answers. But it's been amazing to see how flexible people have been." Emillie Fenton, Head of People, 3 Sided Cube
Ask her the single best thing about the whole rebuild and she doesn't mention a tool once. She says the people. The adaptability, the open-mindedness, the fact they told us when something wasn't working instead of going quiet.
Culture at Cube isn't a poster in the kitchen, or a check box exercise. It’s been the beating heart of the agency since the dawn of time (AKA 2009), and that very heart is the actual reason this worked 💚
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Then everyone got superpowers
Now the fun part. Going AI AF has been like dating someone new who you're so psyched on that the mention-itis sneaks into more conversations than you'd like to admit.
Cubies were smitten kittens.
The line between technical and non-technical basically dissolved. People started building things that would have needed a developer sat next to them a year ago. Emillie's own example: a project manager who can now bust out a client dashboard in Claude.
The old rules went out the window in this new Wild West…and that makes for one helluva HR minefield.
"If you're a project manager, for example, and you can build a client dashboard using Claude, what does your job description look like? What does a developer's job description look like? Will there even be job descriptions in the future? I don't think so. I think it will be more skills based or outcome driven rather than the traditional." Emillie Fenton, Head of People, 3 Sided Cube
Then the org chart. Then progression. Then who reports to whom. We don't have those answers, but bet our girl Emdalf is on the case.
The industry can't even agree what to CALL this. We see a lot of ‘AI native’. Elsewhere it's ‘AI ready’, ‘AI literate’, ‘AI fluent’. That's the speed we're working at. So until that gets ironed out, we’ll settle on ‘AI AF’.
Enter the Balrog
So: 50 people, brand new powers, absolutely buzzing.
And both of the things that have properly gone wrong here came out of that buzz. Not from anyone dragging their heels. From sheer novel psychedness.
Number one, which Emillie files under ‘oops’ rather than ’disaster’.
"People were very genuinely excited about what AI could do for their day to day, and that enthusiasm maybe ran a bit faster than data security did." Emillie Fenton, Head of People, 3 Sided Cube
Nothing malicious. Nobody being reckless. Just excitement moving quicker than the governance around it, and a risk spotted about what was going into which tools. So we reined it in fast, got specific about what's approved and what data goes where, and made sure that message landed with the same urgency as the excitement had.
Officially making Emillie the fun police. Luckily she looks stunning in hi-vis.
Number two is the one that doesn't have a fix, only a practice.
"The line being AI can help you work faster, more efficiently. But what's actually starting to come out isn't a reduced workload, it's actually an increased workload." Emillie Fenton, Head of People, 3 Sided Cube
The maths is rude in its simplicity. You can build more, so you build more, so expectations climb to meet it. And anything AI does in the background, you still have to review, which is more work again. The human in the loop ends up owning accountability for a MUCH bigger pile than they used to.
Two words keep coming back to her from people being lured into the siren call of Claude: Stretched and Context-switching.
Most hours on Claude is not #Goals at 3SC
Then came the Slack post that made her take pause about the pace that the crew were operating. Someone had done an almighty stint on Claude. Fire emojis. Celebrations. A flex that made Em clutch her pearls.
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"I was like, that person needs to take a break. Go look at a bird, go stand on some grass. Like, that is not something that we should really celebrate. I don't think most hours with AI should be a badge of honour." Emillie Fenton, Head of People, 3 Sided Cube
And this is exactly why it's hard. Nobody's showing off. They're pumped. The possibilities genuinely have opened up and they are enthusiastically making themselves at home in this new world. But…in an agency that already moved fast, what happens when the pace jumps again and nobody's drawn a line?
She’s not window twitching and judging, it’s a pain point she’s seeing in her own day. A random Tuesday morning: podcast in her ears, AI notetaker transcribing a webinar, report she was writing with AI's help. Her own digital space hopper, bouncing her through the lot at a frenetic pace.
"Now my brain is processing four different things at once. And as a working mum who is already battling with the juggle of work and home, do I need to be processing four things at once? Is that sustainable? Probably not." Emillie Fenton, Head of People, 3 Sided Cube
How we're actually holding the bridge
For her it was finishing a day bleary eyed, seeing everything in 2D, the beginnings of a headache, and going back over how many things she was really trying to hold at once. So she time blocked her diary to hold the line on how many tasks she picked up along the way, because a protected calendar forces you down to one or two things instead of dipping in and out of six.
Nice lil’ bonus: the work comes out better. Focus time shows up in the quality.
"I don't have a silver bullet answer for this one. I wish I did. But I think the first step is recognising it in yourself." Emillie Fenton, Head of People, 3 Sided Cube
You can't police this from the outside. About 30% of our team's remote and nobody's spotting the person quietly grinding through hour after hour. So it goes into how the place runs instead:
Managers asking about AI load in one-to-ones. Light touch, so it becomes a normal thing to say out loud.
Building and experimenting happens inside work hours. Not the day job plus a night shift.
Reframing what gets celebrated as impact, not volume. Most hours plugged in the matrix stops being a flex.
Team leads and department heads modelling it themselves. Because if a manager's replying at 2am, everyone else just assumes that's the job.
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Where we honestly are
Watching the pattern and getting out in front of it. It’s not solved by any stretch of the imagination, and the thing Emillie has the Eye of Sauron fixed upon.
"I'll continue to be the gatekeeper of people's wellbeing." Emillie Fenton, Head of People, 3 Sided Cube
Because "work smarter not harder" is catchy, but does sweet FA for instruction. The moment your team can genuinely do five times more, somebody has to decide what smarter actually means. That call is human. Every single time. AI will build the thing, draft the thing, review the thing. It will not notice someone running hot, or care whether the person on the other end feels looked after.
"You can't take the people out of people operations, and nor should you." Emillie Fenton, Head of People, 3 Sided Cube
The faster you go, the more the human at the helm matters. We ran so you can walk. Keep that in mind and you'll start your AI journey on the front foot.
Now go forth and fly, you fools 💚
Straight from the Cubes
Want to get the skinny on how the factory rebuild has gone across the teams at Cube?
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Disclaimer: We used AI in the process of writing this blog, but a human was still at the centre! We'd be poor advocates for going AI native if we didn't use AI to help write about it. The story is ours, the quotes are our team's own words, and every line got the human pass 💚
Published on 6 August 2026, last updated on 6 August 2026