GenAI Book | fashengxu

The Owner: A Business Novel about Work in the GenAI Era

We wrote this book as teachers as much as practitioners. In classrooms, we kept asking what our students should become in an AI-rich world: faster prompt writers, or people who can evaluate, take responsibility, and redesign real work. That question pushed us beyond curriculum into a harder one — if work is changing, what should organizations look like so people can do accountable, high-quality work with AI?

To find out, we talked with industry partners living these tensions every day. Leaders under pressure for speed. Operators carrying context no system captured. Teams stuck between compliance and growth. Their stories shared a pattern: the failures were rarely about the model. They were about who owned the process the model was part of, and what happened when nobody did. AI didn't create dysfunction in these organizations. It accelerated what was already there: unclear authority, misaligned incentives, workflows no single person owned. AI does not remove work. It moves work.

The story follows a consulting firm trying to survive a market that rewards speed over responsibility, and the people who have to decide what they are willing to answer for. It begins with pilots and demos and the optimism that comes with a powerful new tool. It ends somewhere harder and more honest, with the question of what organizations must change about themselves before AI can change anything for them. The characters and companies are fictional. The patterns are not. We wrote it as a novel because the logic of organizational change lives in postmortems where no one raises their hand, in career moves that look like demotions, in the slow work of earning trust one workflow at a time.

"AI changes tasks. Workflows need owners."

Fasheng Xu
Assistant Professor of Operations and Information Management
School of Business, University of Connecticut