KEYNOTE TOPIC: A.I.
THE HUMAN EDGE:
LEADING WITH WISDOM IN THE AGE OF A.I.
For most of human history, organizations paid a premium for intelligence: the ability to analyze information, solve problems, generate ideas, create strategies, and produce answers.
A.I. is rapidly changing the economics of everything. Technology can now give us more answers, more capability, and more speed than we’ve ever had. But power has never been the same thing as wisdom, because wisdom isn’t simply knowing what can be done. It’s knowing what should be done.
It’s knowing when to stop strategizing. Which rules shouldn’t be followed. Which problems aren’t worth solving. Which opportunities shouldn’t be pursued. These are the judgments that often make all the difference; they are the Human Edge.
In this energetic and practical keynote, optimistic futurist Josh Allan Dykstra cuts through both A.I. hype and A.I. panic to explore what becomes more valuable when intelligence itself becomes abundant — and how leaders can redesign work to amplify what humans uniquely bring to the equation.
The organizations that win the A.I. age won’t simply be the ones with the most intelligence, but the ones with the wisdom to know what to do with it.
Your group will leaving knowing how to:
- See the difference between intelligence and wisdom — A.I. can generate extraordinarily intelligent answers. Humans still have to determine whether we’re asking the right questions. Learn why judgment, context, purpose, and restraint become more consequential as machines become more capable, not less.
- Ask better questions — A.I. is extraordinarily good at answering the question it’s given. That makes the human ability to challenge assumptions, resist premature answers, and ask a better question one of the highest-leverage skills in an A.I.-powered organization.
- Protect the purpose — When technology makes tasks faster and easier, organizations can become extraordinarily efficient at producing things they never needed in the first place. Learn to resist the task long enough to reconnect the work to the outcome it was supposed to create.
- Create more space for wisdom — Speed is one of A.I.’s greatest advantages… and one of its greatest risks. Learn when to resist speed, subtract unnecessary work, and create the human space required for judgment before faster execution simply accelerates the wrong thing.
THE STORY
I spend a lot of time thinking about the future of work, and there’s something about the A.I. conversation that always bothers me. We keep asking, “What will A.I. be able to do?” It’s an important question. But I don’t think it’s the most important one.
The more powerful question is: “What do we want humans to do?” Because the early examples that excite me most aren’t organizations simply replacing humans with machines. They’re using technology to take work away from humans that machines can do extraordinarily well — and creating more room for people to do something more valuable.
For the entire history of business, humans have been the most intelligent beings in the room. We’re probably not anymore. So competing on intelligence is clearly the wrong game. Instead, I believe our job is to become exceptionally good at the thing intelligence alone can’t give us: wisdom.
And that changes the A.I. challenge from simply “How do we use this technology?” to something much more interesting: “How do we redesign work so extraordinary machine intelligence makes human wisdom more valuable?” That’s the future of work I want to help build.
LET'S TALK
