Don’t Reduce. Reimagine.

Every time I read about yet another CEO cutting headcount, freezing hiring, or issuing an “AI or else” mandate to their employees, I feel a knot in my stomach. Not only because thousands of people will now face an unforgiving job market (though that’s reason enough) but because every one of those announcements signals a failure of leadership and – most importantly – a failure of that leader’s imagination.
I’m sure you’ve seen the kinds of announcements I’m talking about. Companies like Goldman Sachs, Salesforce.com, IBM, and Amazon have all justified workforce cuts by pointing to the efficiencies they’ll gain by investing in artificial intelligence instead. The logic seems sound enough. If technology can make the remaining workforce more productive, why keep so many humans around? It’s tidy math. It plays well on earnings calls. And it misses the point entirely.
If AI is truly as transformative as these same CEOs claim, shouldn’t it expand what’s possible rather than shrink the potential of the very organization these men and women lead? But so far, too many leaders have been unwilling to question an outdated organizational orthodoxy.


The False Idol of Efficiency

Business has long worshipped at the shrine of efficiency. Work harder. Do more with less. Move faster with fewer. Automate everything you can. None of this should come as a surprise. But if efficiency is a well-established corporate religion, AI is the new high priest that offers an irresistible promise of salvation through optimization.
And yes, AI does excel at efficiency. It can automate, accelerate, and optimize in ways no human team can. But when leaders treat it only as a lever for cost savings, they reduce both technology and humanity to their lowest common denominators.
Efficiency might win you a quarter. Imagination earns you a future. AI’s real power lies not in doing the same things faster or cheaper, but in enabling different and better things altogether—the things that were once unimaginable, unscalable, or simply impossible. And humanity’s real power lies in imagining what those things could be, and giving them meaning, purpose, and direction once they exist.
And this is where leaders’ failure of imagination becomes a double-edged sword that cuts both ways: hacking away at the potential of the organization while cutting down the people that power it from within.


The First Failure of Imagination: The Organization

When I think about the first wave of digital transformation, I often call upon the example set by the French multinational Schneider Electric. Once a manufacturer of circuit breakers and electrical parts, the company could have used “digital transformation” merely to squeeze a little more productivity from its factories. Instead, it reinvented itself as an orchestrator of intelligent energy ecosystems—powering smart buildings, smart cities, and a smarter planet.
This type of wholesale business transformation is only possible if leaders don’t merely ask, “How can digital make us more efficient?” They must ask, “What could we become if we were digital to the core?” Now leaders everywhere need to ask the same question about AI: “What could we become if we were intelligent to the core?”
Being AI-native isn’t about implementing agents, piloting predictive models, or producing outputs at greater speed and scale. It’s about re-architecting how you create value when hybrid (human+AI) intelligence is everything.
A pharmaceutical company could evolve from producing pills to creating adaptive health ecosystems that continuously learn from data to predict illness, personalize treatment, and improve population health. A construction firm could shift from erecting buildings to designing living environments that sense, learn, and adapt to the people within them. A university could transform from dispensing knowledge to co-creating it, in a perpetual dialogue among learners, educators, and intelligent systems.
That’s what true organizational imagination looks like. Not optimizing operations in ways that allow the business to replace human workers with AI workflows. Inventing new opportunities for AI-augmented humans to do their best work and deliver their biggest impact. And so, I believe any company that aims to be AI-native must also be innately human.


The Second Failure of Imagination: The Human

The deeper failure, then, is how we think about people. When executives talk about AI “replacing” humans, what they reveal isn’t foresight but a poverty of imagination. They see jobs as bundles of tasks rather than as expressions of uniquely human talent. But people are not productivity units. They are sources of imagination, empathy, judgment, curiosity, storytelling, and moral reasoning—the very capabilities machines lack and the world needs most. These are not nostalgic “soft skills.” They are our superpowers. And when combined with AI’s strengths—speed, scale, pattern recognition, and tireless precision—they become something altogether new.
AI can analyze the past; humans can invent the future. AI processes data; humans find meaning. AI optimizes the known; humans imagine the unknown. Together, humans and AI can do what neither could do alone. A journalist using AI can uncover global patterns of power and influence invisible to the human eye. But it’s the journalist’s instinct that something isn’t adding up, the nose for the untold story, that gives those patterns meaning. A scientist can simulate millions of experiments before lifting a pipette. But it’s her passion for improving the health of millions that frames the questions worth asking in the first place. A designer can collaborate with an algorithm to prototype entire worlds in hours instead of months. But it’s his innate sense of beauty, story, and emotional resonance that makes those worlds worth inhabiting.
AI doesn’t diminish human potential, it amplifies it. And the reverse is just as true: human strengths unlock AI’s full power. The leaders that grasp this will design for it. They’ll stop treating people as costs to be minimized and start empowering them as creators, explorers, and sense-makers in partnership with intelligent systems.
The question should never be “How many people can we replace?” It’s “What new value can our human workers create and in what new ways can they contribute because of what AI can now do in service to our company and customers?”


Don’t Reduce. Reimagine.

To be AI-native is to recognize that intelligence—human and artificial—is now a shared capability of the enterprise. It lives as much in people and decisions as it does in data and processes.
This shift demands a new model of leadership and, more importantly, a new mindset for leaders. Command-and-control must give way to sense-and-respond. Efficiency metrics must yield to measures of originality, insight, and impact. Leadership itself must evolve from managing labor to cultivating imagination.
Leaders who embrace this will stop seeing AI as a threat to their people or worse, a cudgel with which to threaten their people. They’ll see AI as a stage on which human creativity can perform at scale. They’ll understand that thriving organizations aren’t those that replace humans with machines, but those that combine human purpose with machine precision to create entirely new forms of value.
When AI gives you the power to automate the ordinary, your responsibility is to elevate the extraordinary. Leading in the age of AI means shifting from chasing efficiency to championing evolution, from managing work to redefining its meaning, from optimizing the workforce to empowering your people.
And above all, it calls on you to reclaim imagination as a core act of leadership. Because the greatest risk in this moment isn’t that AI will outthink us. It’s that we’ll stop thinking boldly enough—about ourselves, our organizations, and the people who make them matter.
Lead with imagination. Or risk being led by your own lack of it. That’s not just the future of work. It’s the future of human worth.