The Axios founders on how AI ruined your inbox, why the ’90s really were different and how to succeed through ‘Simplify’

Three years after Smart Brevity became gospel inside corporate comms departments, the founders of Axios are back with a diagnosis of what broke their own prescription: artificial intelligence.

Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz sat down with Fortune to talk about their new book, Simplify: Do 50% More with 50% Less , out this month.

The pitch: AI hasn’t lightened anyone’s workload so far—it’s flooded offices with more decks, longer emails and more “work-like activity” that produces motion without progress.

Their fix is a framework the trio says they built by testing it on themselves first.

How AI ruined your inbox The argument is a familiar one amid the “AI slop” discourse of 2026: the technology sold as an efficiency unlock has, in the short run, made everything worse.

“When I talk to people at corporations, they’re like, ‘My team is drowning, everyone thinks they’re smart now,” VandeHei said, adding that it’s a “real issue” with how many people who never made a deck or presentation before are suddenly generating things that need an exhaustive review.

At the same time, incoming pitches have all multiplied, Allen added, both inside companies and in how they present themselves externally—a two-front squeeze, not just an internal one.

“Everybody’s more verbose,” Allen said, chalking it up to human nature.

“Left to our own devices, we’re going to complexify,” Allen said.

“Our meetings stack up, our habits, all our time sucks, and unless you are ruthless about auditing, confronting, looking at what you can delete, then [you won’t feel] the liberation of having more.” Allen borrowed a phrase from former Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield to describe the trap of “work-like activity,” which McKinsey partner Kate Smaje previously told Fortune is like a “false productivity trap.” The two run together in most organizations, Allen said, and that’s precisely the problem.

VandeHei pushed back on the idea that humans are lazy by nature, a common criticism of the “cognitive offloading” enabled by AI.

“People are not being lazy or stupid,” he said—they want to work hard but are having trouble right now distinguishing from real work and work-like activity, further clouded by AI.

“It just creates this, like, energy and life of its own that has no meaning.