Thriving in the AI Era: Becoming a Value Creator

John: "I often talk about this being comparable to what point in human history we have an analogous situation. And I think you have to go back as far as fire to find a comparable analogy. Because as soon as we had fire, we could cook food, which meant we didn't need to spend 90% of our day chewing. We only needed a very small amount of time chewing our food, which meant we had a lot of time for other things. Our jaws could shrink, which meant our tongues became more nimble, so we could develop language, which meant we developed a sense of time. It's as fundamental as fire."

Chris: "That's a good one. Yes. And if you think of it in that sense, that means what we're saying here is that this could be a point in human history where we look back and say when did that start? And we think to ourselves, well, when AI came about, that was the point at which this started."

John: "So where is AI going to get us? That's the thing. AI in that sense could be the thing that allows humans to have a better quality of life. But there is a downside—because they've got more time, that could be idle time that's misused and causes problems."

John: "So if we look at this evolution—first there's no data, so people want to know what's going on. That's data. Then it's like, okay, we've got a load of data but we don't know what it means. That's analysis. And then it's like, well, this analysis is time consuming and we can do better. So that's AI. And because it's big data, we're starting to get overwhelmed. So let's have the AI make all the decisions so we can focus on the big picture. And then it's like, well, let's let AI do the big picture. So what are these humans going to do?"

Chris: "That's a great question. I think that's where a bit of thinking on your part might be able to help with this big thinking around what is going to be the evolution of the relationship between humans in a workforce and AI as part of the organization. Where's it going to evolve? We might go off down dead ends where something is tried and doesn't work, and therefore we learn and move in a different direction. But we're going to end up somewhere."

John: "All right, let's look at your experience in your company of seeing organizations deploying AI. There's an evolution in how they start to use it, and that evolution might actually give us some insights into where people can join the workforce or where it might be going. So take us through those human functional skills from your perspective. We're moving from hard skills being valuable to soft skills being valuable."

Chris: "Soft value is the ability to evolve as a person as technology evolves. That's one thing. Change mindset. Flexible people."

John: "So that's lifetime learning. You're comfortable with lifetime learning. You don't expect to be educated—'I have completed education, now I need to learn nothing else and I will just go out into the world.' Lifetime learning, and your surface skills change and you expect them to change, and to a large extent they are tactical. But your core skills are deep, right?"

Chris: "Exactly. Yes."

John: "There are some analogies in the world from history. A simple one would be the introduction of the calculator. The person who could sit there and add up lots of numbers really well has lost value. And value creation shifts into someone who can use the calculator and start to hypothesize different scenarios for the business rapidly."

John: "Another example—the crisis of photography. Most painters were salon painters. They'd paint your family and you'd pay them. Then photography comes along. It was expensive, slow, cumbersome at first, but suddenly you could get a photograph. What does painting do? It looked like the death of painting. 90% of painters became unemployed. But the ones who remained became the Surrealists, the Impressionists—painting was completely reborn."

Chris: "That's a great example. The low-value photographer was skilled only at using a Hasselblad camera—that's an obsolete skill now. The high-value photographer understands light, nature, and human engagement. They adapted from Kodak to digital to smartphones. Their core skill transcends technology."

Chris: "I would refer to them as value creators. It's a general term for anyone in a workforce who's got a net contribution to the business that's above average."

John: "So it's an 80/20 rule, right? 80% of the value that's added through the business is through 20% of your business."

Chris: "Yes, exactly. And as a person entering the workforce, you want to look for roles that are going to be value creation for the business. My very first role in engineering was managing engineers. I wasn't doing anything of value at that point—I was managing people who created value. When I think back over my career, that was the least valuable job I did. I very rapidly reconfigured my career to get into a role that was creating value rather than managing people that were creating value."

Chris: "That's a great example. For instance, in the space race in the 1950s and early 60s, getting from no experience of rockets entering space to safe human-carrying rockets was massively compressed into those 10 years. The problem was they didn't have anything to help them other than clever people. It required literally hundreds of thousands of clever people to make that work. That's not scalable."

"If they'd had two or three problems at that scale at the same time, they'd have run out of clever people. Today, I imagine if we had a similar space race, it would be much more compressed, much less human-centric, and much more rapidly reaching its conclusion. The ability to create variants, think through what they mean, simulate outcomes—that's something AI and technology can help with."

John: "Another example would be the crisis of photography. The crisis of painting. Most painters were salon painters—they'd paint your family portrait. Then photography comes along, and it's like, 'Oh my god, this is expensive, slow, cumbersome, but we can get a photograph now. What the hell does painting do?' It looked like the death of painting. In fact, 90% of painters became unemployed. But the ones who remained became the Surrealists, the Impressionists—painting was completely reborn."

Chris: "So the crisis of painting is probably a really good example when we start thinking about the characteristics of the value creator 10 years from now. They are creative."

John: "I can give you a direct example of how I'm using it now. I actually think the value I bring is my new ideas, my creative imagination. I will have had a thought—I think this is related to this but I don't know how—and then I'll sit down with AI and we work out the connections. Then I evaluate whether those are real connections or not. But then I've got a genuinely new thought which I can then structure and communicate."

Chris: "That's exactly it. In manufacturing, the same applies—someone like John in the engineering space is being used to reimagine how products could look in two years' time. But you need maybe a thousand ideas to get one good idea. How do you do that faster? You have this idea—that's one of these things—and an AI system can generate a thousand variants, simulate that product being produced and in the market, and come back with all the data within a few hours."

John: "So it's like if you have a good enough core skill, you get into a symbiotic relationship with the technology rather than an adversarial relationship. You're not thinking 'it's coming for my job.' You're thinking 'I can do what I do much better with this technology.'"

Chris: "Exactly. That's a very good point. Every shift in technology has created new opportunities for those that understand the core value of technology."

John: "Have you found there's a significant difference between how decisions are made in Japan versus, say, a Western country?"

Chris: "The thing in Japan is they don't like to be first to do something. They like to follow the leader and outscale them. It's a 'define and scale' approach. Whereas in other countries, they see innovation as a way of keeping ahead of competitors. In Japan, there's more of a wait-and-see attitude—let somebody else burn their fingers first, then do it better."

Chris: "The challenge is that clients are cowards. They like the idea of change but don't like actually changing. 'We need to do something different.' 'Here you go, here's something different.' 'Can you make it look like what we're doing now?'"

John: "The number one problem is you will be surrounded by people who like the idea of change but don't actually want to change. Clients who are cowards. That's reality. When you go out into the world, you will just be surrounded by people who like the idea of change but actually don't want to change."

Chris: "That's very true. There are different modes of engagement. Sometimes you go into advisory mode: 'Here's our advice. Pay the check. What you do is up to you.' Sometimes they want to implement, and you help them. But you have to have different conversations with people who understand value versus people who only measure value."

John: "Right. So you have to go into advisory mode when you're dealing with people that understand value and can sell to the people that measure value."

Chris: "Exactly. The people who measure value only want to know how much it costs and what the downsides are. The people who create value can sell the idea to the people who measure value. If you're having a conversation with someone who doesn't understand value creation, there's just no point having a conversation with them. They'll only look at numbers and not understand what you're trying to do at all. But they probably won't be around for that much longer, hopefully, because they're aware enough—if they've come from a background like this where they've learned the value at an early stage in their career—they'll no longer only think about numbers in the future."

John: "So who's feeling scared and who's feeling excited about the next 10 years? Scary or exciting?"

John: "Generally, I agree with you. I think we could be on the cusp of a golden age, really could. Or it could go really dark really quickly. Quality of life is a key aspect to this. A lot of the thinking we've been doing is around—we feel it's important to turn up the volume on well-being and have well-being really central in terms of decision making and what we're doing in the world. This could absolutely be aligned with well-being, or it could be absolutely aligned with—because all you basically need here is capital. That's it. You just need capital and then off it goes. It just creates more capital. That's it. And it's out of control."

Chris: "Put it this way—in terms of the human element to this, as AI improves, human ability to use AI will improve because we will learn from it and it will learn from us. There is a growing vision of cross collaboration between human systems and AI-based agentic systems."

Chris: "We're mandating that every single one of those 700,000 people runs through a series of courses teaching them how to understand AI. It's going to be important for everyone. You can imagine what that means for your generation coming into that workforce."

"The slogan we came out with for the career development path we're sending to companies is: AI won't lead, but your people will. Humans decide what the relationships are when setting up systems. Humans decide whether the quality of answers reaches their requirements. Humans decide where and how things can be improved. The agentic system is specialized in fixing problems, not in evolving itself."

John: "We have to work on how we deliver value. In every situation we are in, we work out how do we deliver value, and if we keep on doing that, we'll be okay. If we think our value can remain flat over time, it's not going to be a good situation—it's going to be an awful situation. So we have to work out how we continually add value."

Chris: "And an understanding—not technical, but an understanding from a functional and social point of view of AI—is going to be one of the most important skills anyone can have going forward. Because if you know what it's capable of, what its limitations are, what the issues are, the safety, the responsibility, and you could put all that into your brain and think through a problem and say 'I think B is probably the best option because of X, Y, and Z,' you're a very useful member of the future workforce."