The Biggest Opportunity in AI Isn't Automation. It's Human Potential

Someone in your organisation is about to become dramatically more valuable. Someone else is about to quietly become redundant.

Most leaders assume that's because AI is replacing jobs.

That's not what I see happening.

Recently, the CEO from Paraform, the world's largest recruiting marketplace, called out a pattern that he's seeing from the hiring decisions of around 1,000 businesses. He found that the top 12% of candidates receive more than 25% of all job offers. While the top 10% of engineers earn roughly three times what the bottom 10% earn - even though they hold the same job title.

Then he shared something even more remarkable. One founder reduced hiring targets by 60% after four engineers using AI produced more output than a team of ten had the previous year.

That's not because AI suddenly made average engineers brilliant. It's because it amplified brilliant engineers.

The truth is that high performers have always produced the work of 2-3 average people. The engineer who solves in a day what others take a week to figure out. The operations manager who redesigns a process that saves thousands of hours. The salesperson who consistently wins the clients everyone else thought were impossible.

The biggest opportunity in AI isn't that organisations can do the same work with fewer people. It's that capable people can create exponentially more value than ever before.

Key Insights

• AI is not eliminating jobs. It is collapsing the value of routine, task-based work while dramatically increasing the premium on people who can think, create, and lead
• AI exposes poor thinking, poor judgment, poor curiosity and communication. Employees can no longer hide behind old processes.
• Every role, from graphic designer to head of operations, now requires a vision of what that work could become, not just competence at what it has been
• Leaders who help their teams make this shift will build organisations that compound in value; leaders who don't will quietly accumulate irrelevance
• The shift is not about being a tech expert. It's about being willing to step up from doing the work to redesigning it

How AI Is Changing the Workplace (and Why Leaders Need to Respond)

For a long time, there was a natural ceiling on how much any one person could produce. Even the most talented graphic designer was constrained by hours of execution. Even the sharpest marketing manager was limited by what a team of two could physically create in a week.

AI agents have changed that equation. The constraint is no longer execution. It is imagination.

One person with strong critical thinking skills, a clear vision, creativity and fluency in working with AI tools can now produce the output of three or four people. Not by working harder, but by thinking better, and letting AI carry the repetitive, time-consuming execution load.

Two years ago, fewer than 4% of engineering roles in the US offered $300,000 or more at the top of their salary band. Today, that figure is over 21%. Roles paying $400,000 or more, which barely existed two years ago, now appear weekly. And the same dynamic has moved well beyond engineering.

Anthropic is hiring a single enterprise copywriting lead (10 years of experience, salary band of $225K to $320K) rather than a team of mid-level writers. Meta has reportedly offered individual AI researchers signing bonuses of $100 million, with packages topping $300 million over four years. The math is the same in each case: when one exceptional person can move the trajectory of a company, the premium for getting them becomes effectively uncapped.

The "10x worker" used to be Silicon Valley folklore. It is now the baseline assumption for any role with real leverage: engineers, operators, marketers, designers, product leaders. The gap between people who work at that level and people who don't is widening into a chasm. The people on the right side of it have more leverage than I have ever seen.

Talent has always been the constraint. AI just made it the only one that matters.

The bottleneck has moved. And the people who understand that early will be in an entirely different position from the people who don't.

Why Leadership Matters More Than AI Technology

Here's where most conversations about AI and work go wrong. They focus on the tools: which platform, which workflow to automate or how to prompt a system. 

The bigger shift is a change in what your job actually is.

Doing the research is no longer the job. Knowing which questions are worth researching is the job. Writing the first draft from scratch is no longer the job. Knowing what the draft needs to say, who it needs to move, and why it matters. That is the job. Building the spreadsheet is no longer the job. Knowing what the data is telling you and what to do about it. That is the job.

That is not the end of expertise. It is a reframing of where human expertise creates the most value.

AI is extraordinarily good at execution. It is not good at judgment. It cannot tell you which problem is worth solving first. It cannot identify a new customer opportunity that doesn't yet exist in the data. It cannot feel the gap between what a client says they want and what they actually need. It cannot look at an organisation and sense where the next breakthrough is hiding.

That is the work of a thinking human. And it turns out, that work is far more valuable than most of us have been paid to believe.

In my work with leaders over nearly two decades, the executives who reach genuine impact are not the ones who execute fastest. They are the ones who see furthest. The ones who move organisations, build teams that outlast them, and create things of lasting worth. AI hasn't changed that insight. It has simply removed every excuse not to act on it.

What does this mean for the people you lead?

Every person in your organisation is facing a version of the same question, whether they've articulated it or not: who am I becoming in this new environment?

The graphic designer who used to spend three days executing a brief can now produce the same output in hours. Which means their role is no longer about execution speed. It is about creative vision, brand judgment, the ability to brief AI systems in ways that actually land. That is a different set of skills. It requires a different self-concept.

The same is true for the operations manager. The marketing coordinator. The customer success specialist. Every role is now asking its occupant to step up, to automate the parts that can be automated, and to become far more ambitious about the parts that can't.

Here's what I observe consistently in my executive coaching practice: many of the people in your team have been quietly trained, through years of task-based work, management that rewarded busyness, and organisations that confused output with value, to keep their heads down and get things done.

That worked. For a very long time, it worked.

What worked is no longer enough. And that is not a criticism of the people in your team. It is a description of the shift they now need your help to make.

How to help your team rise to what's actually being asked of them

When budgets are constrained and revenue is under pressure, the first instinct is to look at your people and think: I need better people.

I think that's the wrong first question.

Ask this instead: what would happen if the people I already have were freed from half of their execution work? What would they be capable of if the repetitive, time-consuming parts of their role were handled by AI, and their attention was genuinely redirected toward thinking, creating, and leading?

The biggest opportunity right now isn't replacing your team. It's helping capable people become exponentially more valuable. For many people, this is outside their knowledge of what's actually possible for them. No-one has ever given them the green light to think like this.

This doesn't mean avoiding a hard assessment of whether your people have the right skills to go forward. They may not.

But the question worth asking is not "does this person have the skills we need?" It is "can this person develop them?"

Those are different questions, and in most cases the second one has a more hopeful answer than leaders expect, particularly when AI removes the execution load that has kept people too busy to grow.

Those questions can feel uncomfortable the first time you ask them. Many people on your team have quietly stopped imagining their work differently, because no one asked for it. When you start asking, expect some resistance. Expect some excitement. Both are useful information.

In practice, helping your team make this shift means three things:

1. Help them map what they can automate

Ask every team member to identify the parts of their week that feel repetitive, low-energy, or disconnected from the work they care most about. Those are the tasks for automation.

When people see AI as a route to eliminating the worst parts of their job, resistance drops sharply and quickly.

2. Help them articulate their highest-value contribution

What do they do that only they can do? What judgment, creativity, or relationship capital do they carry that no AI replicates? These are the areas to protect and expand, not defend or outsource.

3. Hold a vision of who they're becoming

Encourage employees to see of vision of themselves in the future.  What does their role look like in a year? What aspects of their job have they automated? What are they doing that brings more fun, creativity and self-expression of who they are that adds value to others?

The leaders I coach who navigate this shift well are the ones who see their people's potential before those people see it themselves. They name it. They make space for it. They hold the expectation without threatening it.

One of the things I write about in Trusted to Thrive is the difference between leaders who manage what already exists and leaders who create conditions for what's possible. That distinction has never mattered more.

The Future of Work Belongs to Leaders Who Develop Human Potential

AI is the end of human mediocrity.

For the first time in history, the limits on what one capable person can achieve are no longer set by time or execution. They're set by imagination.

The workers who thrive in this environment share a particular quality. They are the ones who looked at their role and asked: what would I do if I was doing the work of three? What would I go after? What problem would I finally solve? What would I create? What will my role look like in 12 months?

These are questions of imagination, vision, and possibility. Bring it to your team, and watch what opens.

AI is the greatest amplifier of human potential we've ever created. Great leaders won't be remembered because they introduced AI. They'll be remembered because they helped ordinary people discover they were capable of extraordinary things.

If you lead a team and you're thinking about how to help your people step up to what this moment actually requires, the Tribe of Trusted Leaders Program is designed for exactly that. It gives leaders the skills, the self-awareness, and the frameworks to build teams that are capable of far more than their current conditions are asking of them, and to help each person become the version of themselves that's ready for what's coming.

You can also explore this work through executive coaching, one of the fastest ways to get clear on what your own highest-value contribution looks like right now, and how to lead others toward theirs.