AI initialism
- Artificial Intelligence
- Also known as “the robot that might take your lunch”
- A productivity tool that’s somehow also a source of existential dread
- Something your boss now asks about in every meeting
Giving your Job to AI verb phrase
- To delegate everything to a machine and hope it works out
- To remove yourself from the loop because it’s “just easier”
- To quietly become irrelevant while your AI gets all the credit
- A strategy we strongly suggest you reconsider
AI: Capable, yes. Conscious, no.
AI is fast, flashy and increasingly good at doing things humans thought were safe from automation (like writing… oops). It can summarise your research, organise your notes, draft your emails and maybe even remember what that client said in the meeting you half-snoozed through.
But before you pack up your desk and let the bot take the reins, let’s take a moment to consider a different reality – one where you still have value.
Because while AI might help do some of your tasks, it still can’t do your job.
Can it or can’t it?
Let’s take a brief look at what this latest generation of AI tools can and can’t do.
Things AI is pretty good at:
- Turning your scattered ideas into a structured draft
- Crunching data (often without sighing dramatically)
- Generating a bunch of options (for something you’ll probably rewrite anyway)
- Speeding up all the stuff you secretly wish you didn’t have to spend your valuable time doing
Things AI is bad at (and should never be trusted with):
- Understanding what your client / colleague needs
- Reading between the lines
- Navigating organisational politics (turns out that’s quite a human thing)
- Understanding why your client doesn’t like what you produced
- Saying the right thing when a client is unhappy
- Taking responsibility for anything (anything at all)
In short: AI can be a pretty good assistant for you but would be a pretty poor replacement for you when you choose to take a day off.
What happens when you give AI too much?
- You get shallow, generic output that sounds like… everyone else
- You risk saying something tone-deaf, off-brand or just plain wrong
- You lose credibility — suddenly you’re just “the person who checks the AI”
- You risk forgetting how to do the job yourself
- You become someone who once really added value — but chose to give that away…
What AI can’t replace (aka why the world still needs people like you)
- Your ability to challenge bad ideas
- Your knack for knowing what the client really needs, not just hearing what they ask for
- Your ability to form the right question, not just ask the first one that comes to mind
- Your talent for building trust with clients and colleagues
- Your weird-but-brilliant ideas that no prompt could’ve predicted
- Your gut instinct that says, “Hmm, this doesn’t feel good enough”
- Your ability to identify the right, finished output, not just the most common answer to a poorly formed question
These are the things that make you human. And irreplaceable. (Yes, you.)
So, what should you do with AI?
Use it like the glorified intern it is. Friendly. Capable. Needs supervision.
Let it:
- Handle the grunt work so you can shine where it counts
- Help you think faster, not for you
- Be your brainstorming buddy — not your ghostwriter
- Organise chaos so you can find the insights
You don’t have to fear AI’s abilities. Just don’t confuse them with leadership.
Conclusion: Keep your hands on the wheel
It’s tempting to let AI take over – it’s efficient and it can help make you more efficient. But it’s not perfect – and it does not know what good looks like.
So don’t be the person who disappeared behind a robot and called it progress. Be the one who shows up — thoughtful, creative, irreplaceably human — and uses AI to do what you do best… only better.
AI can’t replace people who care, so keep being the one who cares about delivering what people need, not what’s easiest to deliver.
Here at The Maverick Group, we spend every day thinking about how to make both ourselves and our output better. We do quite often add a bit (or a lot) of AI into the mix, but we don’t just blindly follow the AI trends. Instead, our Technology Solutions unit helps our clients navigate the increasingly complex AI space in a somewhat obsessive search for the simplest, most efficient solutions (whether they involve AI or not). And we keep reminding ourselves of what we as humans bring to the table.
