Are you still the smartest person in the room when AI can analyze more information than you can? This is what most of us are thinking about these days.
When your favorite AI agent can draft the presentation, summarize the meeting, identify patterns in the data and give you ten possible solutions before you’ve finished your first cup of coffee, where does that leave you?
Some of us are cheering, since it’s saving us a ton of time. Others of us are angry or anxious, losing sleep over the fast pace at which our roles and industries are changing.
I’ve spent more than two decades coaching leaders through promotions, career transitions, and leading through organizational complexity in moments when the path forward wasn’t obvious.
And lately, I’m noticing a shift in the conversations I’m having.
The frame used to be: How do I perform at my best, build my capabilities, and leverage my network to advance my career?
Increasingly, I think the timelier frame is: Which of my capabilities are uniquely human, and how do I strengthen those to ensure I stand out in the current era?
For much of our careers, we were rewarded for accumulating knowledge and proof of our value.
This used to look like: Know more. Work faster. Develop expertise. Secure another brand-recognized certificate, degree, badge. Become the person people turn to for the answer.
Now: AI is changing that equation remarkably quickly.
Knowledge still matters. Expertise absolutely matters. But access to information is becoming increasingly democratized, even if some of that information is problematic.
The executive who can produce the fastest analysis may no longer have an advantage when everyone in the room has access to powerful technology capable of doing the same. The advantage hasn’t disappeared. It’s moved.
The following abilities are deeply rooted in distinctly human capacities. And I believe their value is going up, not down.
- Discerning what is more valuable.
- Knowing which question to ask.
- Reading the room.
- Recognizing what isn’t being said.
- Building trust with someone who sees the world differently than you do.
- Having the courage to challenge an answer that looks perfectly reasonable on paper but doesn’t feel right.
- Understanding what motivates another human being.
- Knowing yourself well enough to recognize when fear, ego or an old pattern is influencing your decision.
I see all of these as absolutely necessary in my own work as well as in the critical leadership roles played by my coaching clients.
What this Looks Like for Your Career Decisions
I regularly work with leaders facing complex career decisions. On paper, one path often makes perfect sense because it offers a next-level title, more compensation, greater responsibility, and a platform from which to make a bigger impact.
But the twist that so often comes into play at this point in coaching work is this: as we continue talking through the pros and cons, something else emerges. Even though the opportunity aligns with what this leader thinks they shouldwant, something in their gut points in a different direction.
After I guide a visualization activity or a somatic exploration, what is revealed is this: my client’s inner wisdom knows better and the seemingly “perfect sense” opportunity isn’t as well-aligned with the life they deeply desire to evolve into next.
This distinction, which emerges through a human-to-human connection and exploration involving nothing more than innately human capabilities, changes the conversation.
Yes, a spreadsheet or an AI agent can serve as highly effective tools to help us evaluate an opportunity. But humans have interiority, embodiment, and the capacity to make meaning.
Technology cannot decide what constitutes a meaningful life for us, nor what our heart & soul are calling for. That is our deeply human work.
Your humanity is not an obstacle to optimize away.
This is where I think we need to urgently exert our human agency and throw up a yellow caution flag.
There’s an understandable temptation right now to ask:
How can AI make me more efficient?
It’s a useful question.
But I posit that we must also ask:
For what purpose am I becoming more efficient?
Seriously. Ask yourself: What is it you want more time for?
For more productivity? And if so, toward what end?
Or do you want to be more efficient to fuel a more impressive career in service of a particular kind of life?
For thousands of years, wisdom traditions have invited human beings to return to versions of these same questions:
Who am I?
What matters?
How do I live well?
How do I serve?
Technology evolves. But these thousands-year-old questions remain.
The Irreducible Human
Over the coming weeks and beyond, I’m going to explore what is Irreducibly Human: the qualities I believe will become increasingly important as AI becomes more and more embedded in how we work. We’ll talk about:
- Presence.
- Discernment.
- Relationships.
- The wisdom of the body.
- The distinctly human ability to create meaning rather than simply process information.
I’m deeply optimistic about what technology can make possible. I also believe this moment asks the following of us: Use the technology. Learn from it. Let it expand what’s possible for our humanity.
And at the same time, become even more intentional about developing the capacities that make you human. Your future career may depend on both.
A question to sit with this week:
As technology becomes capable of doing more of what you’ve traditionally been valued for, what is it about you that becomes even more valuable?
I’d genuinely love to hear your answer.