I’m finding more and more uses for Artificial Intelligence. There are still large areas where there’s no point engaging it at all – anything physical, for example, though I’m tempted by the promise of a camera-plus-software tennis analysis app.
There’s also a third category: things it might be able to do, but which are beyond my current skill. The vibe coding route, for me so far, has been tentative and experimental, mostly revealing the difficulties of starting from complete coding ignorance.
AI will reach us anyway
Whether we actively engage or not, AI is going to reach us. It already has, in the shape of internet searching, meeting notetaking as standard practice and for recruitment and performance evaluation in many organisations.
So the point of using it isn’t to become an enthusiast. It’s to become literate enough to recognise what it can do, what it can’t, and what it does badly in ways that look convincing.
You can build that literacy through ordinary routines:
- holiday planning (options, constraints, trade-offs, logistics)
- everyday admin (summarising, drafting, checking)
- strategic thinking (alternatives, risks, decision frames)
- dealing with institutions (council letters, legal processes, complaints)
- practical solution finding (I fixed a stone-cold radiator this week, a champagne-worthy first!)
- artistic analysis (discussion of themes and personalised recommendations far superior to the Netflix algorithm)
The employment shock is familiar
The effects of AI on employment will feel like a cousin of the industrial revolution in the re-organisation of labour. Then, machines reshaped physical work. Now, systems reshape chunks of cognitive effort.
The “intelligence” part is still breath-taking: the range, the speed, the pace of improvement. And the most disruptive feature is not that it can do one thing brilliantly; it’s that it takes over manyof the supporting tasks that make professional work expensive and slow.
Take a journalist who is already experienced in feature-writing. In that case, AI can plausibly replace almost all of the intellectual labour of the craft:
- research and background trawling
- transcription and extraction
- organising material into a usable structure
- drafting and redrafting at speed
Yes, dear reader, I was that journalist. The new method doesn’t eliminate the need for judgement. But it does compress the work with a faster process and almost always better results.
The question remains: how do you train the professional to use it with discernment? That’s murkier. Because the failures without the training experience won’t always be obvious. The ‘almosts’ matter and may turn out to be exactly where the risk and loss sit – reputationally, ethically, legally and culturally.
The economics look rough for many skill holders
For those whose value has lived in words, numbers, and graphics – which is a very long list – the economics are bleak. Large chunks of traditional tasks are suddenly cheap. When the core price drops, the activity becomes:
- a human hobby
- a boutique premium service
- or an internal capability that no longer supports an external market
This means the shape of ‘professional’ will change. A workable stance (for now) My current stance is unromantically pragmatic:
- use it where it saves time and improves clarity
- ignore it where it adds friction or fake certainty
- learn slowly in the areas where skill is the real bottleneck
- assume it will be present in the background either way
I’m not aiming to be pro- or anti-AI; rather to stay oriented when a lot of thinking has become cheap, and where judgement, taste and responsibility may remain scarce. And that lands directly in facilitation, leadership and Applied Improvisation. Our work is mostly live, demanding attention, listening, timing, trust, negotiation of meaning and the courage to stay with uncertainty without rushing to closure.
The new AI can help with the before-and-after – briefings, options, wording, synthesis – but in the room it can’t take responsibility for relationship, or notice the flinch that tells you the group has quietly left the conversation. So I don’t mind AI commoditising paperwork, while we focus on the human craft: curating space, making sense together, and deciding the next move when there isn’t a script.
