The Great Conversation: What Becomes More Valuable When AI Can Do the Work?
Hello everyone, and welcome to The Great Conversation.
For years, the conversation about artificial intelligence and work has revolved around one unsettling question:
What happens when AI can do what we do?
Write the report.
Analyze the spreadsheet.
Draft the contract.
Create the presentation.
Produce the code.
But perhaps there is another question hiding underneath it.
What parts of our jobs were never really about the computer in the first place?
A recent Financial Times article begins with a striking prediction from Microsoft's Mustafa Suleyman: that most computer-based tasks performed by white-collar workers could be fully automated by AI within the next 12 to 18 months.
Whether that timeline proves accurate or not, the prediction reveals something interesting about how we sometimes imagine professional work.
We picture the lawyer writing documents.
The accountant working through numbers.
The project manager updating plans.
The marketer creating campaigns.
In other words, we picture the person sitting in front of the computer.
But a job is rarely just the visible output appearing on the screen.
Lawyers also appear in court and negotiate with people.
Project managers visit sites, resolve disagreements, and coordinate teams.
Managers persuade.
Colleagues exchange information.
People build relationships, read situations, challenge one another, and share knowledge that may never have been written down anywhere.
And then, of course, there are meetings.
Meetings have almost become a symbol of everything people dislike about office life.
Too many meetings.
Meetings that could have been emails.
Meetings about other meetings.
Yet research cited by the Financial Times complicates that familiar complaint.
A study of Norwegian workers found that meetings consumed about 12 percent of working hours and 14 percent of company wage bills.
But higher-paying and higher-revenue companies actually devoted more resources to them.
Much of that meeting time involved planning, problem-solving, information sharing, and project coordination.
The researchers even compared meetings to broccoli:
widely disliked, but perhaps good for us anyway.
And this is where the AI question becomes more interesting.
Artificial intelligence is extraordinarily good at working with information that can be captured, stored, processed, and transmitted digitally.
But organizations contain another kind of information.
Tacit knowledge.
Experience.
Judgment.
Context.
The thing someone knows because they have spent twenty years doing the job.
The concern someone notices because they have been inside the building.
The hesitation in someone's voice during a negotiation.
The relationship that allows two people to resolve a problem with a five-minute conversation.
Much of this knowledge does not live neatly inside a database.
It lives inside people and between people.
And paradoxically, AI may make that human layer even more important.
If artificial intelligence allows one person to generate reports, analyses, designs, strategies, and other forms of output much faster, organizations may not suffer from a shortage of output.
They may suffer from an abundance of it.
Someone will still have to decide what matters.
Someone will have to coordinate it.
Someone will have to question it.
Someone will have to persuade other people to act on it.
Someone will have to understand the larger picture.
The Financial Times points to another revealing signal.
An analysis by PwC of one billion job advertisements across six continents found that employers hiring for AI-exposed entry-level roles were increasingly seeking skills such as management, strategy, teamwork, and face-to-face presence.
Those sound suspiciously like the abilities we once called “soft skills.”
Perhaps they were never very soft.
For decades, technology has helped us remove friction from human interaction.
The phone call saved us from having to meet.
The email saved us from having to call.
The message saved us from having to email.
Each step made communication faster and more efficient.
Now AI may take that process dramatically further.
But there is an interesting possibility hiding at the end of that road.
The easier it becomes to automate what happens on the screen, the more valuable what happens away from the screen may become.
Meeting someone.
Understanding them.
Building trust.
Walking through a workplace.
Seeing something that never made it into the data.
Knowing which question to ask.
Connecting ideas that technically belong to different departments.
Making a judgment when the available information does not provide an obvious answer.
Perhaps the future of work will not simply divide tasks between humans and machines.
Perhaps it will force us to rediscover what human work actually was.
Because if intelligence becomes abundant, judgment may become scarce.
If content becomes abundant, attention may become scarce.
If answers become abundant, knowing which questions matter may become scarce.
And if digital production becomes increasingly automated, human connection may become surprisingly valuable.
Which raises a deeper question...
If artificial intelligence becomes capable of doing more and more of the work we perform on our computers, could the most valuable skill of the future be knowing when to step away from the computer?
Take a moment to reflect.
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