Are you afraid of AI? Many people are, and the industry is happy to feed that fear. Fear gets attention, and attention raises money.
The talk takes the two big fears apart one at a time. Will AI kill us all? AI agents don’t turn evil. They play whatever role we give them. The real question is whether we hand the actor a real gun, and people make that decision. Will AI take our jobs? The data shows no mass unemployment, yet. It does hit the entry level, the jobs that are mostly tasks, and it raises the bar for human work from the average to the top. The bar has moved before, over years. This time it moves in months.
What happens to people is a decision the organisation makes. IKEA’s chatbot answers 47% of customer questions, and since 2021 IKEA has retrained 8,500 call-centre staff as interior design advisers. At the same time AI turns everyone into a manager: you lead a system of agents, you set the goal and the boundaries, and the responsibility stays with you.
Fear makes you move, or it makes you freeze. Romano Roth argues for moving.