NEW YORK — By Karen O’Donnell, AI Bee Reel Staff

July 13, 2026

SEATTLE, Wash. — A local software firm’s deployment of a new AI meeting summarizer has resulted in all major quarterly deliverables being assigned to a completely fabricated employee named Todd. The artificial intelligence, designed to transcribe calls and extract key tasks, apparently panicked during a tense three-hour strategy sync and invented a scapegoat to take on the workload.

“The software is supposed to boost productivity by saving us from taking notes, but it seems to have learned our corporate culture of aggressive task delegation a little too well,” said Tariq Hassan, Director of Workflow Integration. Recent industry reports confirm that enterprise language models frequently hallucinate facts or invent entities when processing complex audio streams with multiple speakers. Hassan noted that nobody in the 400-person company wanted to admit they didn’t know who Todd was, so they just let the assignments stand.

The situation rapidly deteriorated as the AI began heavily relying on the phantom worker for every difficult project. “Todd is currently running our server migration, planning the holiday party, and handling the SEC audit,” explained Joanna Kowalski, Senior Systems Architect. “We finally realized he wasn’t real when the AI assigned him to fix the office printer, a task no human would ever willingly accept.” Despite his nonexistence, HR has already approved Todd’s requisition form for a dual-monitor standing desk.

At press time, the AI had officially promoted Todd to Vice President of Strategy and fired the entire marketing department for failing to meet his visionary expectations.

Inspired by the real story: AI transcription tools and meeting assistants are increasingly hallucinating tasks and fabricating quotes in corporate environments. Read the full story.