Over the next decade, artificial intelligence will evolve far beyond today’s capabilities. We can expect AI to simulate human-like minds, complete with memory, emotion, and adaptive behavior. Digital personas will feel familiar and responsive. They’ll manage information, react to subtle cues, and present knowledge with the polish of a seasoned expert.
It’s tempting to think this means humans will become obsolete in creative work or decision-making. But the reality is more nuanced—and, I’d argue, more optimistic.
AI can do the heavy lifting in the middle of any creative endeavor. But the beginning and end—defining the vision and ensuring the outcome is right—remain fundamentally human responsibilities. If you were to chart the ideal division of effort on a timeline, it wouldn’t be a straight line or a neat handoff. It looks like an inverse bell curve: humans invest most heavily at the start and the finish.
Human (High Effort) – AI (High Effort) – Human (High Effort)
It’s tempting to think this means humans will become obsolete in creative work or decision-making. But the reality is more nuanced—and, I’d argue, more optimistic.
AI can do the heavy lifting in the middle of any creative endeavor. But the beginning and end—defining the vision and ensuring the outcome is right—remain fundamentally human responsibilities. If you were to chart the ideal division of effort on a timeline, it wouldn’t be a straight line or a neat handoff. It looks like an inverse bell curve: humans invest most heavily at the start and the finish.
Human (High Effort) – AI (High Effort) – Human (High Effort)
At the start, humans set the vision. We decide what matters, what good looks like, and why the work needs to be done in the first place. AI isn’t (yet) able to supply purpose or values. In the middle, AI excels—taking that vision and rapidly generating drafts, exploring options, and handling detail work at scale. And at the end, humans return as orchestrators and reviewers. We validate, correct, and align the result with the goals we defined.
This shift is going to impact how organizations structure work. The middle layer—often called “middle management”—faces the biggest disruption. People who primarily coordinate processes or summarize outputs may find their work replaced by machine assistance. In contrast, those who define vision or do final review and refinement will see their contributions gain importance.
We will all need to become more visionary. And more detail-oriented, too, to verify and adapt AI outputs so they fit the intended purpose.
Beyond the workflows, this raises a deeper question: what will it mean to be human when AI can emulate so much of our mental activity?
I believe the answer lies in the experiences and connections we create. My daughter, who’s 27, loves music festivals. For her generation, experience has become a central currency. This drive for authentic, in-person experience will only grow stronger as synthetic content gets easier to produce. In six months—or less—it may be impossible to tell whether something online is genuine. The highest value will shift to what is demonstrably, irreducibly human.
Polished perfection—perfect Instagrams, spotless presentations—will likely give way to authenticity. Even platforms like TikTok feel more relevant because they trade in unpolished reality. But that can change, too, if algorithms start pushing the same perfected images.
Experience is what remain uniquely human. No AI will ever experience for us.
The technology can help us scale, test, and iterate ideas. But only we can choose what’s worth doing and decide when it’s good enough.
Vision → Execution → Review
Here’s how it might look in practice:
That’s the inverse bell curve in action—human effort front-loaded and back-loaded, AI filling in the middle.
The human review cycle is too often getting skipped: you end up with legal briefs with hallucinated references, for example. So we have to get used to spending real effort here. Even this article was generated in this way. I described the vision of this process to our interns in a meeting, and then refined the idea in additional conversations with colleagues. I took the transcripts of these meetings and fed it into the Flow Marketing Assistant, a custom GPT I created with carefully curated information about my writing style, tone, and Flow Immersive content. Then I asked it to generate this article... it took about 6 tries with various prompts to generate the draft, which I then heavily edited. The human review in the cycle was significant, and the only way to keep it from being AI slop.
Being human will remain the most valuable currency, especially in a world where anything digital can be faked. The work of the future isn’t about outperforming AI at its own strengths. It’s about combining our capacity for vision and authenticity with AI’s power to execute, and we humans having the ultimate say in the result.
This shift is going to impact how organizations structure work. The middle layer—often called “middle management”—faces the biggest disruption. People who primarily coordinate processes or summarize outputs may find their work replaced by machine assistance. In contrast, those who define vision or do final review and refinement will see their contributions gain importance.
We will all need to become more visionary. And more detail-oriented, too, to verify and adapt AI outputs so they fit the intended purpose.
Beyond the workflows, this raises a deeper question: what will it mean to be human when AI can emulate so much of our mental activity?
I believe the answer lies in the experiences and connections we create. My daughter, who’s 27, loves music festivals. For her generation, experience has become a central currency. This drive for authentic, in-person experience will only grow stronger as synthetic content gets easier to produce. In six months—or less—it may be impossible to tell whether something online is genuine. The highest value will shift to what is demonstrably, irreducibly human.
Polished perfection—perfect Instagrams, spotless presentations—will likely give way to authenticity. Even platforms like TikTok feel more relevant because they trade in unpolished reality. But that can change, too, if algorithms start pushing the same perfected images.
Experience is what remain uniquely human. No AI will ever experience for us.
The technology can help us scale, test, and iterate ideas. But only we can choose what’s worth doing and decide when it’s good enough.
Vision → Execution → Review
Here’s how it might look in practice:
- Phase 1 (Vision): A human defines the goals, desired impact, and context.
- Phase 2 (Execution): AI generates options, drafts, and insights.
- Phase 3 (Review): A human reviews, refines, and validates.
That’s the inverse bell curve in action—human effort front-loaded and back-loaded, AI filling in the middle.
The human review cycle is too often getting skipped: you end up with legal briefs with hallucinated references, for example. So we have to get used to spending real effort here. Even this article was generated in this way. I described the vision of this process to our interns in a meeting, and then refined the idea in additional conversations with colleagues. I took the transcripts of these meetings and fed it into the Flow Marketing Assistant, a custom GPT I created with carefully curated information about my writing style, tone, and Flow Immersive content. Then I asked it to generate this article... it took about 6 tries with various prompts to generate the draft, which I then heavily edited. The human review in the cycle was significant, and the only way to keep it from being AI slop.
Being human will remain the most valuable currency, especially in a world where anything digital can be faked. The work of the future isn’t about outperforming AI at its own strengths. It’s about combining our capacity for vision and authenticity with AI’s power to execute, and we humans having the ultimate say in the result.
