What's left when everything is automated?

The list of what AI can take over keeps growing. Scheduling meetings. Answering emails. Writing reports. Summarising meetings. Managing customer support. Generating leads. Managing projects from start to finish. Onboarding customers.

The list is endless. I looked at part of it in my book, and that was right at the start of the AI applications. I read this list, and then I read it again. And then I tried to imagine a job description that doesn’t appear in it.

The list isn’t exhaustive, but I find it exemplary. Because what it primarily shows isn’t individual tasks, but categories: communication, coordination, documentation, analysis, summary, support and so on.

Over thirty years I have spent inside organisations. As a consultant, as an owner, a partner, a team member, in the most varied industries. And to be honest, a large part of my work consisted of exactly these tasks. Preparing meetings, summarising results, writing emails, producing reports, coordinating people. Most of that was the core of my work, because the summary of a meeting isn’t admin when the meeting was the decision, and an email isn’t routine when it settles the conflict.

The discussion makes no difference between the what and the how. It sees: answering emails. And it says: AI can do that. But an email to an unsettled customer where in three sentences you say the right thing, because you understand what he’s actually asking, is something different from an email with a proposed meeting time. It’s the same activity. It isn’t the same task.

Automation sees categories. Humans see situations. The category “customer support” contains a thousand different moments, nine hundred of which can in fact be automated and a hundred of which can’t. But those hundred are the ones the customer remembers, the ones where he felt that someone was really listening. I’ve seen moments myself where a deep customer relationship came out of a complaint.

So what’s left when the list is worked through? My standard answer used to be: strategic and creative work and leading people. That’s always what comes up when people try to explain why humans are still needed. But a strategy doesn’t come out of thin air. It comes out of the meetings that are being summarised or the emails that are being answered. If you take that away, no strategy is left. What’s left is a person sitting in an office who no longer knows what to think about, because all the information that feeds their thinking is running through machines.

I’m not saying that nothing should be automated. Of course automation makes sense, but some things are boring, because they repeat themselves constantly. And awkwardly enough, this is exactly where the mistakes come from, in these repetitive tasks. A machine can do that better. But what’s left? That isn’t a side question. It’s an important question that isn’t being taken seriously enough.

The honest answer to the question of what’s left when everything is automated would be: we don’t know. No one has ever thought this list through to the end, because at the end of the list there is something no one wants to say out loud. At the end of the list is the question whether there is still work.

Not whether there are still jobs, but whether there is still work a human has to do because a machine can’t. The answer to this question decides on more than efficiency. It decides on the role of the human in an economy that may no longer need them.