The biggest problem is not that artificial intelligence will think for people, but that it will reveal how long we have been asking people not to think too much.
For years, many companies valued employees who reliably followed procedures, stayed within the boundaries of their role and completed tasks without asking many questions. Someone who asked why we did things a certain way often seemed to be making things complicated, while someone who suggested a different approach could easily become “difficult to work with”.
Little by little, we created organisations in which people were expected to be good at carrying out instructions.
Then AI arrived and showed that precisely this kind of work could be automated faster than we had expected. A machine does not tire of repetition, lose concentration because a task is monotonous or look for deeper meaning in a process that has already been defined. If we clearly explain what it should do, it will try to do exactly that.
That is why I am less interested in how much AI will change jobs than in what it will reveal about the way we have shaped those jobs ourselves. If, for years, we reduced a person's value to following procedures, carrying out orders and staying within a prescribed framework, we should hardly be surprised that a technology has emerged that is getting better at taking on precisely those tasks.
A person's value has never been only in knowing the answer. It also lies in recognising that the question is wrong, seeing a problem before it becomes a number in a report, connecting what the system has separated and saying that something no longer makes sense even though, formally, it still works.
For that reason, we will probably have to look differently at the people we have considered demanding for years. Someone who questions a procedure is not necessarily troublesome. Someone who refuses to accept “that is how we do things here” is not automatically opposed to the system. Sometimes, that person is simply still paying attention to what others have stopped noticing.
Such people are not always easy to manage. They ask for explanations, raise further questions and do not accept every decision simply because it has been made. But the very thing that once made them seem impractical may now become their greatest value.
Perhaps the biggest change AI brings to companies will therefore be organisational rather than technological. It will make us reconsider what we actually expect from a person at work. If we ask them only to carry out what we already know, it will be difficult to justify their advantage over technology that does the same work faster and more consistently. If we expect them to see what we have not yet seen, their value does not disappear. On the contrary, it becomes even clearer.
For years, we rewarded people for giving the answers we expected. The time ahead will probably make us value more highly those who notice that we may have asked the wrong question.
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