- 4 days ago
As artificial intelligence takes on more cognitive work, from writing and analysis to decision-making, the role of the human mind is shifting. Those who know how to work with AI effectively are accelerating and compounding their advantage. But most are defaulting to more passive use, relying on systems that optimize for speed and fluency, not depth or judgment. At the same time, the conditions of the digital age (constant information, instant answers, and algorithmic shortcuts) are reshaping attention, critical thinking, and our ability to reason independently. This raises a deeper, more consequential question, not just about what AI can do, but what happens to us as we use it.
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00:19Good morning. How's everyone doing today? Really pleased to have you all here. Pleased to be
00:25with some amazing speakers today and sharing the stage with them. And I had to remind myself the
00:32title of the panel this morning, because originally I had thought, is AI making us more
00:38stupid by using it? But actually the title this morning is who thinks, who decides and who thrives
00:45in the age of AI? Is AI being a good pilot helping us being better humans or is it not?
00:51With me I
00:52have, I'm going to go this way forward, nothing against you Andra for going last, but I have
00:59Dr. Moira Gilchrist, the Chief Global Communications Officer at Philip Morris International, Tahira
01:05Zamanzada, Executive Advisor on AI Strategy at SAP, and last but not least Andra Koenig, CEO of Global
01:13Quantum Intelligence. So I'm going to start with just waxing lyrical a little bit, a little bit poetic
01:19this morning. What does it mean to be human? So I went to the neuroscientist, Anil Seth,
01:26and he likes to ask this question. When we look at AI, what are we really looking at? The machine
01:33or a mirror? We're after all the creators of AI. He calls it a two-way mirror. We build these
01:40systems,
01:40he says, in our own image, and then we start to see ourselves through them. The brain becomes just
01:46the computer. So Seth thinks that's a trap. That's reducing ourselves to information processing,
01:53throws away almost everything about what makes us human. And what's interesting about being human,
01:59in his words, cognitive computers, we're feeling creatures, we're more breath than thought,
02:06and we act because we get hungry, because we fear, we're restless, and we're alive. So thank you for
02:15allowing me to wax poetic a little bit this morning. I have some very, very good friends here on stage
02:21with me, and we're going to unpack this. We're going to take it from the tangible to the technical
02:27to all the way to the metaphysical. So I'm going to start with you, Dr. Mora. You said the jobs
02:34of the
02:34future will reward uniquely human skills. Tell me a little bit, maybe not in a sentence, but a couple
02:42more sentences. Do you think AI is making humans more valuable or less valuable in this new economy?
02:49I have to caveat my answer by saying I'm an eternal optimist. So I look at AI through a very
02:55optimistic
02:55lens. And I think my takeaway is that it makes humans much more valuable. And I like to think of
03:03it
03:03rather as not as artificial intelligence, but actually augmented intelligence. Because what
03:09we've done is encoded all the knowledge that exists in the world. And that's now freely accessible to us
03:16as humans with our other wonderful skills, which are not about memorizing facts and knowing things,
03:23the skills around critical thinking, judgment, perspective, which sort of normally sit in the IQ
03:31bucket. But then all those wonderful things that sit in the EQ bucket, which is seeing things through
03:37the eyes of other people and making connections and so on. So we don't need to worry anymore about
03:44learning things, learning facts, because they're all there. So we can really focus on the other two.
03:50And I think that's where our uniquely human qualities will become way more important to focus on in the
03:59future. And certainly, as leaders of 80,000 people in my company, that's how we're thinking about it.
04:04How do we start to create a culture where those things are much more valued than what you know?
04:12And I love that. And we'll get a little bit more sort of what does that really mean in the
04:17enterprise or what
04:18does it mean in the workplace? But I love the way we've changed AI to mean augmented intelligence, because it
04:25means
04:25not replacement. But Tahira, you're in the organizational space as well. So you advise entire enterprises on this.
04:32So from your point, from the front line, where you said, where do you think AI genuinely makes people sharper?
04:41And where does it make them a little bit more passive, maybe?
04:47That's a great question. So the way I think about it is how are folks using AI as a thinking
04:55partner, as a sparring
04:57partner, if you would say, in sports, to be able to interrogate data with you, to be able to ask
05:05it questions,
05:07not just use it to find answers. And so oftentimes, in order to do that, you really have to think
05:14about using it as
05:15your digital assistant, as your intern. The same way a junior employee would provide you with some facts, you would
05:23have
05:23to ask, hey, where did you get this from? Cite your sources. Be able to have that sort of intentional
05:31friction with AI, so you can both find value in it. As you're learning more about yourself, the AI is
05:38also
05:39learning you. That's something to think about. And because AI is overly confident, right off the bat, we think
05:45to ourselves, well, you know what, we're just going to accept the answer. And you shouldn't do that, as you
05:50can
05:50imagine, because of hallucinations. So the best thing to do is really use it as that thinking partner
05:56and focus on trying to complement the work that you do instead of just completely take over the work
06:03that you do. Even if 80% of the work is, let's say, being done on a task by AI,
06:09that other 20%, you have
06:10to be able to intentionally reserve it for yourself for those critical thinking skills, for the judgment,
06:17and the next step phases of that process. So we've heard augmented intelligence, it needs to be
06:23your co-pilot. You're still steering the wheel. You're the captain. It's more of like your intern.
06:31Andre, I've heard you say that it could also make us intellectually lazy. So I want to put that on
06:40you.
06:40What happens? Is it enough to use it as a co-pilot? If we're really, really smart and intelligent and
06:49we
06:49know how to use it, are there still risks with using it? And I'm the technocrat on the panel, so
06:57I have a
06:57more extreme view. Using it as a co-pilot, I think, is one of the worst things you can do.
07:02Because speaking
07:04about myself, I'm certainly lazy. If you give me an opportunity to be lazy, I'll be lazy. You have to
07:09force me to go out there. We were talking about catching up on work last night, right? All those
07:15emails with time zone differences. If you don't force me, if my client or something doesn't force
07:19me, I'll use a tool to make my life easier. In my team, we're a small company that does data
07:27analytics
07:27for quantum computing. So a third of my team is PhDs in quantum physics. Insanely smart IQ.
07:35Intimidating. The rest is kind of tech developers and salespeople and economists. We put this AI
07:43command center in place a year ago to upskill. I'm being dramatic, but giving my team AI tools.
07:51The PhDs in quantum physics suffered from it because they've been trained all their life to just use
07:58their brain power, right? And now they have to compete with the AI that's almost as good with
08:03them and getting better all the day. My sales guy, who knows Jack, fill in the plank about quantum,
08:10now he sounds smart about quantum all of a sudden. But he is a problem solver. He's a go-getter,
08:17right? So he does so many other things now that he couldn't do before. His performance has just
08:22skyrocketed. So I think it shouldn't be a co-pilot. I think it should be a sparing partner.
08:28You should use AI to challenge yourself, to question yourself. I try to do that. I'm not always
08:35successful with it. And I think more about strategic topics and our small little market of quantum
08:40technologies. Who can I acquire? How can I put a competitor out of business? I have my hypotheses,
08:46but then I challenge that with the AI. I did that for this panel. I had my ideas and then
08:53I gave
08:54Gemini my ideas and asked what did I get wrong and gave me a couple new ideas.
09:00So the very things that are coded in our DNA as humans, being able to be always inquisitive,
09:09those EQ moments you were talking about, the skills that we have them because this is how we were born
09:15with. Those are the things we really need in this time so that we don't become lazy when things are
09:21very easy to grasp. So I wanted to go back to you, Moira, and I'm thinking about the education component
09:27to this because you hear a lot of the anxiety around AI is, you know, is AI going to replace
09:32us
09:33eventually because we're a little bit lazy? We get lazier as we go. It gets better. We get worse,
09:38right? So what are those skills and that education at all levels, but especially the university level should start embracing?
09:49Right now, most universities are doing either or. They're either embracing it in a way or just discarding it altogether,
09:57treating it as cheating. Well, I have a very personal experience of this.
10:02So when I have two adult children, three years apart, and when the eldest, my daughter, started at university,
10:10chat GPT was just, you know, started to come into consciousness. And it really was treated by the
10:18professors as an absolute no-go. This is you cheating if you use any of these tools. And I got
10:25really
10:25concerned about that because I understood these tools are not going away. So if we're not teaching our
10:30young people how to embrace them and get the most out of them, then we're going to be leaving them
10:36behind.
10:37But thankfully, three years later, when my son started, the approach had changed quite dramatically.
10:43It was no longer a sin to to be using the tools. It was it was even I wouldn't say
10:49quite encouraged,
10:50but but certainly it was accepted. And I think there's a whole exercise that needs to go through
10:56the education system and entry level jobs and in in corporations as well of how are we encouraging
11:05people who maybe may have been put off? And how are we encouraging to roll their sleeves up and
11:11understand what this can do, understand the limitations, understand what skills they need
11:17to develop in order to make the most of them? And just building on what you said, Andre,
11:22I think one of the things we have to be very conscious of is these tools are not always right.
11:27There was a recent court case in Germany, where I think one of the models claimed that they were 91
11:33%
11:36accurate in the answers they gave. Well, that's a whole lot of inaccuracy there. So if we don't have
11:42the humans, they're flexing their analytical thinking and their judgment, using their perspective
11:48and their gut feeling, and all the things that we've developed through our own lifetimes to actually
11:54inquire of these models, are we using them in the right way? And is the answer actually correct,
12:00useful, etc. So, you know, changes in the in the education system are absolutely necessary to really
12:07focus on that, rather than just building a database of facts in young people's minds, because knowledge
12:14has now been essentially democratized. I love that because I love what you're saying, Moira, I call
12:22this cognitive offloading. And I had that issue recently, I write a lot about quantum, the geopolitics
12:29of quantum, economics of quantum, fascinating stuff. I don't write myself anymore, right? I've been collecting
12:36with my team massive amounts of, sorry, data on quantum. And when I need to write about a topic,
12:42I curate a data set, I give it my own structure and so forth. And then I let the, you
12:47know, AI write
12:48my article. Then usually I proofread it and work on it, except I didn't the other day. Cognitive uploading,
12:57and the editor called me, it's like, it was embarrassing, right? So you have to be very careful with that.
13:02But again, we get, it's built into our brains and DNA, this mean reversion towards the easiest solution,
13:12right? So. Right, because up until now, I would say, even now in this moment, the goal is knowledge
13:20acquisition. We're in this knowledge economy right now, we're on the verge of completely embracing the AI
13:26economy. But currently, the knowledge economy, the information economy is you acquire as much
13:32information as possible, knowledge, then you prove that you have this knowledge through a test or an
13:40assessment. And then after that, that degree, that credential gets you to the promised land, which is
13:47a job or something, you know, whatever, the opportunity, right? That is changing a little bit.
13:54So Tahira, you, at your workplace, I know that you're focused more on the human-centered approach
14:01to this. Tell me what that really means for you. Yeah, we talk a lot about empathy-driven,
14:08human-centered design when we're talking to enterprises. And the traditional model of CX,
14:14UX hasn't changed. In fact, because of the fact that we're automating so much of the back-end of
14:21whether it's coding, workflows, you have more time to be able to build a beautiful design because now
14:27you have space and time for CX and UX, which I love. I do, I do agree with you. I,
14:34even on LinkedIn,
14:34when I'm reading articles and I see that it, I guess they call it AI slop. It's not slop, but
14:40you could
14:40really tell that it's, it's not authentic and genuine and it's sort of written. I'm sure you all
14:44are picking up on it a little bit if you haven't yet, but it's, you could tell with the M
14:48dashes,
14:49with the way certain things are said. Slowly with time, that'll go away. I think everybody's
14:54just really excited right now and they want to use it. Within the enterprise, it is critical that you,
15:01that you find value and you take advantage of the domain experts, the subject matter experts
15:07that you have hired to do a job. And so that nuance and that discernment is not going away. It's
15:14actually going to be amplified now. So just because I'm able to find an answer very quickly,
15:20great. What am I going to do with that answer? How am I going to be able to interrogate that
15:25data
15:26and be able to make a meaningful business decision off of it? And so human in the loop is something,
15:34HITL, we talk about a lot. I'm sure many of you have heard of it, but the whole point of
15:39it is,
15:39is to intentionally build governance, responsible AI steps, speed bumps. So you could be able to
15:46make a decision as a human being on whether step one, two, and three that the AI did is right
15:52or
15:52wrong. And then you can move on to step four or five. So I hope that's something that we're all
15:57thinking. And I know oftentimes when we're thinking about AI, we're thinking, okay, how quickly can I get a
16:04task done? Sure. Being able to manage that time is important, but ultimately what you want to do is
16:11find value in and find ROI in the employees that you have hired. You hired them for their domain
16:18skills, for their industry expertise, for their subject matter expertise, take advantage of that.
16:23Now they have an ability to amplify all the work that they do just because some of the routine mundane
16:30tasks can be automated now. Can I just build on that? I have a wonderful experience. I have a reverse
16:36mentor, a wonderful woman who works in a completely different part of the organization to me. She's
16:43pretty much an AI native. And I asked her recently, as an AI native, what do you need that you're
16:50not
16:50getting from the AI tools we have? And she said, I need a board of virtual advisors. I'm like, okay,
16:57tell me more. She said, I need a digital Moira, a digital John, a digital Greg, a digital whoever,
17:05that encodes somehow the experience and the wisdom that those of us who've been in the organization for
17:1220 plus years bring when we're framing a problem or analyzing data or thinking about creating solutions.
17:21She said she can't build that quickly enough. So how can we encode what we have learned in order to
17:29make that available to people like her so that the skills she has in using the AI tools can be
17:34sort of
17:36mega boosted by some old age wisdom. I thought that's a fascinating thing. We don't know how we're going to
17:42do it, but we're thinking about trying to do something like that.
17:47Moira, that's actually such an interesting thing because digital twins have been such a buzz,
17:53even at the last couple of days of this conference. But also, I hear about career
17:57twins. You mentioned LinkedIn, Tahira, earlier. It's no longer the resume, the way we are
18:07distributing signals about what we have done and our experience in life. It's just not the way to do
18:13it anymore. This is just not the way. It's too static. It's too easy to discard because it becomes
18:22slop. But I did want to say, Tahira, how long did it take you to figure out and to be
18:29discerning
18:29that things now look too much like it looks synthetic. And for you to say, that's not what
18:35I want to hear. So I'm wondering, because you said earlier, Andre, it could make us lazy,
18:42but it could also make us more discerning. Do we go back to our humans? This is a question for
18:47all
18:47three of you. Do we go back to what we know best when we see things are not as authentic
18:54because we
18:55crave that human authenticity? Who wants to take first? I think if everything's perfect,
19:03how are you going to stand out? If you have a perfect report card, if you have a perfect resume,
19:09what are you going to do to stand out? And so that's the situation we're in right now is
19:14everything, all the resumes look perfect. Everybody looks great. They make really nice PowerPoint decks.
19:19And so what's that other thing, that emotional aspect that's going to make me want to hire you
19:25or hire you? And so, of course, absolutely, the human part is going to be very important now,
19:31in my opinion. If I think this idea of everything looks perfect, then it's kind of boring, right?
19:38I think this idea of discernment is really important. If you think human beings over millennia
19:43have developed an ability to pretty well tell when another human being is lying, right? You get signals
19:50and so on, and you feel uncomfortable. And I think that's what we need to develop with regard to AI
19:56slop is this discernment that, you know, if it is looking too good to be true, what actually is the
20:03truth? I think that's a skill that we're still building, but I think we're getting better at it.
20:07If any of you are scrolling social media, I'm pretty certain when I see something that's just
20:13garbage. But we need to do that on scale so that we're not following the wrong things and going down
20:20the wrong track. Andrei, you're my chief provocateur. What if it's not junk? What eventually, you know,
20:28AI becomes really, really good at being human? I'm less worried about the AI and more about the humans.
20:36What you mentioned on LinkedIn, again, in quantum, we see this every day now. It was dead silence about
20:44quantum on LinkedIn and on Twitter until a few months ago. Now, every day, you have these graphics
20:49that explain the quantum world to you and different tech. And they're utterly, utterly rotten, but they get
20:54hundreds and thousands of likes. Again, human nature. So people know it's AI slop. It has the bright,
21:01flashy colors, misspellings. People love it. They view, they engage, they repost, retweet. So I have less,
21:09less confidence in the human fortitude. We actually built what you suggested, Moira. We built the GQI
21:18exoskeleton. I need marketing help. But it's basically an agent that represents our four
21:25target markets. So we work with investors, governments, end users, and vendors. So we built
21:30a real asshole investor. And the idea is that you go spar with them. And when you do it, it's
21:35amazing.
21:36It's like, okay, I really need to work on my pitch, my positioning. But doing that amongst our travel
21:42and jet lag and 500 emails is almost impossible. I'm too old to do that. I'm not going to change
21:49my ways, right? So to me, there's a little bit of a moral offloading. But the AI algorithm picked my
21:58candidate. The AI algorithm built my portfolio and recommended I buy SpaceX. What do I have to worry
22:06about? And I'm not sure that we can change our ways? Well, we have a lot to worry about. When
22:14I
22:14was researching this topic, all I got was worry and anxiety. Anxiety that maybe we're cognitively
22:22regressing. Anxiety that AI is going to get too good and replace the human in the loop. We're
22:28not even going to need that. Is this anxiety just part of what happens every few hundred years? Or is
22:36this something, there's something there? I think I'm going to retitle my job. I think I'm the chief
22:41stay calm officer. Because an enormous change is coming to companies, to society and to humankind
22:52in the next five to 10 years. And it feels really unsettling. And I know what that feels like.
22:58We've transformed our company into something unimaginable over the last 10 years.
23:05And my boss calls it, we've developed an enormous capacity to suffer.
23:11Because change brings suffering. And you have to get used to it. You have to get used to this idea
23:16that there is uncertainty. But I absolutely am convinced that through the other side of this
23:23change, we will be better as society and we will be better as humans as well. But there's going to
23:28be a
23:29little fuzzy moment where everybody just feels a little bit uncomfortable. But this too shall pass.
23:38I think human beings are very resilient. I'm sure we were nervous when the calculator came.
23:44I'm sure we were nervous when the internet came. And now we're nervous because AI is here.
23:51My recommendation is, and I'm not saying this because I'm in the space. I'm saying it because
23:55I'm a human being. Perception is reality. And if we keep focusing on the negative, of course,
24:01we're going to manifest that. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think what we need to do is use a
24:06little bit
24:06of our woo-woo manifestation skills and manifest positive things. Because what we can do right now
24:16is amplify human beings, human creativity, empathy, discernment. And I appreciate what you said.
24:23But I have more faith in human beings. I think we just need to restructure the message a little bit.
24:30The reason why this is important and why I'm so passionate about it, the conversations we had,
24:35is there's a whole generation of middle school, high school, and college students that are
24:41depending on us to fix this narrative. And if we keep constantly bombarding them with negative
24:46information around technology in general, it's not helping them. It's making them feel very nervous
24:53about coming into the workforce. And so I really hope we all move forward thinking about ways where
24:59if we see a headline in the media and it's negative, think about how you can flip it to a
25:03positive.
25:03And what can you do to help somebody calm and ease their fear a little bit? Because again, as you
25:10said,
25:10this too shall pass. And this is just a moment in time where we have to build really good habits
25:15around AI. It's not going anywhere. So let's build good habits around it.
25:20I wake up in panic every morning and I think we stand no chance.
25:26Thomas Friedman, a famous US author, coined this phrase, the speed of acceleration of innovation.
25:33We all know about this exponential law, right? And AI data will grow exponentially,
25:38GPU power will grow exponentially and so forth. We're just not wired for that. This gap between
25:43how technology grows and that's what AI is to me. It's this inflection point. It's less about the AI.
25:49It's what we've achieved in technology. Technology will continue to grow exponentially.
25:54Our brain, our bodies, our minds, our beliefs can't. By design, by nature, they are built to
26:00evolute over time based on is a dinosaur chasing us or not, right? We stand no chance.
26:08Okay. I'm not going to let us end on that note, Andre. Thank you. I did say he was our
26:15chief
26:15provocateur. We're sort of in our last minute here. So I wanted to just close by saying,
26:24for those of you that have read Scott Galloway, he's been here as a speaker a few times. He wrote
26:29a
26:29book, The Big Four. And I say this to my teenage kids all the time. It's the best of times
26:35and the
26:35worst of times. It's the best of times if you're ambitious, have ideas, want to do great things,
26:41because the toolbox is amazing. It's exponential. It's the worst of times if you just want to
26:48just go by and do the normal things, you know, and just do what, you know, 20, 30 years ago
26:56was just
26:57get a job and do it for 30 years and then, you know, go to sleep. So it's the worst
27:03of times and the
27:04best of times remains to be seen. But if we went 30 years from now, what is the one thing
27:12that you
27:12think is true? And I'm going to start with you, Andre, because I'm scared to leave you last.
27:19Is it an exciting time? I think it will end up being an exciting time with, unfortunately,
27:26suffering along the way, like every evolutionary step that Maher alluded to earlier, right?
27:30But ultimately, it will create a new generation and a new type of being that is going to be somewhat
27:37hybrid. And that will be the next step. Very quick, because we're out of time.
27:45For me, I'm excited about seeing what developing nations do with AI. This is the first time they have
27:51access to a business advisor, a tutor, a translator, a mentor. And now to be able to see what they
27:57do with
27:57that access is going to be very exciting for their economic creativity.
28:01I totally agree with that. But I would add, I think it's going to be a time where the imaginers
28:07are king. So people who are creative and can see different ways of doing things, I think they're
28:12going to come to the fore. And I find that very exciting. What a great note to end with. Thank
28:17you to
28:17all of you. Thank you to our panel. Appreciate you.
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