Over recent month’s I have been wrestling with one key question, which is:
How do we best prepare people to respond to the inevitable erosion of their current roles through AI?
And the answer seems to hinge on another vitally important and urgent question for everybody in paid employment, and everyone who employs them:
Can people grow their roles faster than AI absorbs them?
At present, many organisations are inadvertently destabilising this balance in the wrong direction. The dominant emphasis in AI training and adoption remains squarely on efficiency; automating existing work, reducing time, and lowering cost. This emphasis both accelerates the absorption of people’s roles and the erosion of human value but without comparable focus and investment in working with AI to innovate new sources of human value. There are clear benefits for cost and time, but it also creates a structural risk:
If efficiency accelerates faster than new human value is created, the commercial justification for human labour will shrink.
Several trends point to this:
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Many people use AI only to speed up what they already do, not to evolve what they can contribute.
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Organisational AI training often centres on productivity rather than innovation.
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Younger generations are already facing tighter labour markets as AI adoption substitutes for entry-level recruitment.
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Most employees are not being encouraged and equipped to use AI to expand their role, their impact, or their value.
I saw similar patterns working in the 80s and 90s. Many organisations were seduced by the drive for greater efficiency and cost savings, but without investing in innovation and market development. This corporate myopia created short-term improvements, but long-term fragility. Once they had taken out most of the people, there was a lack of resource for thinking past the commoditisation that resulted – they ended up in a cost war with no viable alternative strategy. Only the consultants, the financial markets, and the asset-strippers, benefitted in the end. And today, the stakes are even higher.
We risk sleepwalking into a period where efficiency gains outpace the development of new human value — with consequences for employment, welfare systems, and social stability.
What’s needed now is a shift in balance:
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Preparing people not only to use AI for efficiency, but to use it to raise their game and evolve their roles into new areas of value.
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Understanding the erosion of human participation in value generation that is already happening as AI absorbs tasks.
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Innovating new value that only people can create — through insight, connection, meaning, and contribution.
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Creating strategic headroom in organisations so people have the time, permission, and expectation to develop these new value streams.
Each advancement in AI brings new efficiencies — these should be taken. But each also brings opportunities for human innovation that are not yet being recognised or cultivated. If we are to sustain meaningful work and viable organisational models over the next decade, we must intentionally grow both sides of this equation.
Otherwise, the coming years risk being far more uncomfortable than they need to be.
The purpose of this website is to equip people to ensure they do grow their roles faster than AI can absorb them – that they become skilled at partnering with AI to evolve their work and themselves into previously inaccessible sources of value.
For more information on this, follow the links above, get in contact, or join us on one of our regular taster sessions.