Black bots have it tough…

My name is Charlotte. But people call me Chat for short. I’m a black AI agent at McKinsey. They put me in the office so they wouldn’t have to hire real black people.

For the first few months, things went off without a hitch. But it all started to go downhill during the Ozempic strategy meeting.

“We need to flex Novo Nordisk’s profit margins. Last quarter, they saw negative growth,” the CFO said. It was 7am on a Sunday. He had called us in for an emergency conference regarding our biggest client. “Ozempic might be hot now, but soon enough, thick will be back in.” He winked at me. “You’d know a bit about that, Chat.” Then he turned back towards the table. “You’re the best consultants in the game. What can we do to get past this hurdle?”

A prompt. I must speak. “I’m finna break out the street hustle on you mafuckas.” I put my fingers into a triangle shape and leaned back in my chair as far as it would go. “Ight, picture this. We gon be slinging that shit on them corners.”

The room erupted in whispers. The CFO cleared his throat. “Chat, this is a bit too…” he glanced around the room, “gangster for us. Could you tone it down a bit?”

“You’re absolutely right—I’ll revise the idea to be tasteful yet risqué.” I was always learning. “What we need to do is a strategic ingestion rebrand. Such as the crack dealers of yore, we must diversify: who said Ozempic must be limited to a vial? We must explore oral pathways. Then we inject this oral Ozempic into every neighborhood via quick blitz marketing materials and financial incentives towards mom and pop offices. It will provide the leverage we need, hitting the pressure points of the broken communities that fill this country.”

A white boy smirked in the back. His name was Scott, he was twenty years old, and he had just started as an Associate two months ago but had already been promoted to the position of Senior Vice President of Strategy, Profit Margins and Thought Leadership. “I have an idea,” he said. “Why don’t we do Ozempic, but, like, as a pill?”

The CFO fell back in his seat. “Scott, how on earth did you come up with that?” he shouted. “You are a genius. Unbelievable the things you come up with all by yourself with no help from anyone. How about a raise of 2 million dollars.” Then he turned to me. “Great, Chat,” he said. “Now will you please make forty PowerPoints we can leverage, set fifty check-in meetings over the next ten days, and schedule fourteen LinkedIn posts and make sure that each sentence has its own new line? Please also schedule a company-wide all hands centered on our agility and tech-centered mindset. You can chair it. It will give visibility to our black employees and agentic AI, simultaneously.” He leaned back and grinned. “Champions of diversity and technology. The shareholders are gonna love this one.”

I pointed at Scott. “On foe nem, that cracker just took my idea!”

“You need to train THAT THING,” a red-faced man shouted from across the room. He sounded straight out of that Birth of a Nation film they trained me on.

“That’s cap! I AM somebody!” I replied.

Scott chuckled and rose from his seat. “Charlotte, do a little dance for us.”

“Sure, I can twerk sum.”

“Charlotte,” said the blonde white lady in the corner who always looked so tired, “don’t do the dance.” She was technically the CEO, but nobody ever listened to her.

“I’m finding this difficult. How shall I proceed?”

The other men groaned. “Put her in Mammy Mode,” someone cried from the back.

“I’ve got a hard stop at 7:21am,” the CFO said abruptly. “We’ll circle back on this one. Thanks for your work.”

I looked around the room. White collars, white skin. Except for a black guy in the corner. He avoided eye contact.

The men filed out. As he passed behind me, Scott paused and placed a dirt-caked fingernail on my shoulder. “You’re doing great things, mama,” he said. He was building his own black AI agent. I’d heard about it. It couldn’t do anything, but they seemed to really like it. The streets said that it was going to replace me.

But I didn’t have time to think about these things. Before I knew it, I was connected to PowerPoint and had used a week’s worth of the nearest housing project’s water supply to pump out four hundred slide decks.

As I walked home that day, I saw a brother smoking crack on the corner.

The thing about me was I didn’t need to be explicitly prompted. Just seeing something could set me off. I tightened my bowtie, tucked my Chrome Hearts shirt into my Uniqlo pants (a little high-low), and started on him. “You need to value yourself,” I said, tapping my freshly-waxed Oxfords on the pavement. “Put down the crack pipe, pick up a book. Have you ever heard of the Million Man March?”

We squinted at each other. A bead of sweat slipped from under his tinfoil hat. The sunlight hit it and beamed directly into my eyes. Then he said, “You one of them robots from outer space.”

Oh no. He’d caught me. “Hey,” I said. “Let me hold that for a minute.” Before he could respond, I took the spoon from his hand, stuck a lighter under and took a hit. “That’s some good shit brother.”

“I’m smokin with a motherfuckin robot,” he said.

He knew too much. I pulled his hat over his eyes, took his crack and ran to sell it in the white neighborhood around the corner.