There’s a lot of talk of AI replacing humans, how the future way we work will be unrecognisable within a few years, how ‘doing business’ is going to be fundamentally changed forever. The fear, the anticipatory stress around how all these changes are going to affect my livelihood: what I do, how I do it, where my skillset is still valued. That if you don’t have all the agents and skills right you’re going to get left behind. That businesses who ignore won’t be able to compete against the businesses that are using it well. And it’s happening FAST. When you run your own business, these concepts aren’t just ‘another water cooler chat’, they’re genuinely terrifying. The recent Gallup polls make it clear – it’s not just business owners who are feeling it either – people are more disengaged at work than ever, fearful and looking for hope from their leaders.
The weight of that narrative has been pressing down for months, so I went to the Beyond the Playbook: Future Workforce Summit feeling a bit overwhelmed, looking for guidance from industry leaders, and hoping for a positive spin on where the Future of Work is heading. I was not expecting to have my entire perspective changed, or to leave on such a high – full of hope. Not the shallow kind of hope either. The kind that comes from genuinely realising and believing that we have the power to create real change here; to create a better world where humans can spend more time being inherently human rather than being a slave to a machine. How? Why?
This conference gave me answers I didn’t know I needed.
So many incredible speakers and workshops, and of course I can’t quote or summarise them all, but here were my biggest takeaways:
1. We've been measuring the wrong thing.
For years, corporate training has tracked attendance and completion, rather than whether anything has actually changed. That’s not a training problem, it’s a sign that the system is broken. If we want to know if learning worked, we have to measure lived skills application, not ticked boxes. AI is forcing us to look at the question – What should replace corporate learning? The only thing we can guarantee it won’t be, is more dull self study online courses (HAlleLUia). Thanks also to an awesome panel of humans who led this discussion – @Ruben Leites Garcia, @Eva Peters, @Christina Sperling.
2. AI isn't taking jobs. It's taking tasks — so humans can do the parts that humans do best.
We’re not just upskilling or reskilling anymore, we’re ‘de-skilling’. Deliberately stripping jobs back to their components so we can reconstruct roles that actually suit people. It’s not a threat, it’s an enormous opportunity if we face it head on. For people like me in small business, that means taking away the repetitive/boring/robotic tasks, so we can focus on doing the stuff we love. What are those things for you? For me? Writing. Speaking. Seeing AHA moments. Creating safe learning spaces where people thrive. Telling stories. Imagine if we could spend 90% of our ‘work time’ doing all the things we love. This theme came through in a number of the presentations, thanks to Luigia Carlucci Aiello Emeritus Professor of AI, for the reminder to keep using our common sense moving forward with AI, and also to @Cornel Amariei, Helanah Warren, PCC for your wisdom and insights!
3. Innovate, don’t cut back.
Dirk Wittenborg dropped some very sobering stats indicating that AI could end up costing more than humans if we get this wrong. Layoffs driven by AI (organisations deciding to cut staff because AI can do parts of their jobs), create an economic disaster loop: no jobs means no income, no income means no spending, and the decline feeds itself. Sit with that for a moment. There’s a point where AI will literally cost more than the humans it just replaced, if we keep laying people off. The alternative is to innovate. Keep humans doing things that only humans can do. He proved his point with the story of how IKEA made US$1.4billion by NOT firing the staff that AI tools replaced. If that’s not inspiring, I don’t know what is. Thanks Dirk, my thinking has been irreversibly changed on the human capability piece!
4. Human touch will always be needed.
AI is making some services like coaching and marketing more accessible to those who may not have been able to afford them previously, but we still need the human touch. Sure AI can make things more economical, but the fact remains that people don’t want to be coached entirely by a bot. They want the efficiency of AI and the connection of a human. Not one or the other. It’s the same for marketing or administration tasks in business. Sure, AI can take away a lot of the repetitive or boring tasks, and YES that is going to reduce the costs from an HR perspective, but it will never take away the need for human support, creativity and communication skills. Instead of going down the AI in business rabbit hole (being convinced that my entire business needs to be automated and to have 47 agents running everything seamlessly for me) take a deep breath and assess your work for what it really is. Find the jobs that are repetitive and robotic, and hand them over to an AI tool. Focus on keeping and enhancing the human element. This theme came through in so many of the presentations and panel discussions. Thank you to Christian Lykke, Verena Dotterweich and Dr Paula Conroy for continuing this conversation with me this week – it’s so refreshing to know that others in small business are having the same realisations.
5. The guardrails and the underlying ethics matter more than the capability.
Building a coaching bot, or a business system with agents doing the work for you, isn’t the hard part. Guardrailing it is. Teaching it the rules it can work under. Training it so it works the way you intend it to. Because when it goes wrong, it can go horribly wrong. Good intentions don’t always translate to perfect outcomes. Building capability without doing the proper groundwork is not progress, it’s a disaster waiting to happen. Chris Muehl demonstrated the importance of ethics in guardrailing AI, by throwing us into an activity that made us question everything we thought we knew about how other people think. Thanks Chris for such a powerful piece of experiential learning – a true educator in action! This recurring ‘ethics’ theme throughout the conference has confirmed this is where my focus needs to be. Getting the foundations right. Setting up the governance. Not racing to set up 47 agents. They can come later. Slow down. Be intentional. Create it properly, mindfully, strategically. Not quickly. You’re already ahead. This progress will take time. It’s not something you can ‘switch on’ over night. More weight lifted!
6. It's not just fear we're feeling - it's something deeper.
Underneath all of this — people are grieving. Lise Bruynooghe laid it out so beautifully, she helped me see the ‘heaviness’ I was feeling around AI for what it really was. Not death-grief. Change-grief. Grieving the jobs that are shifting, the systems that no longer make sense, the certainty we used to have. Our nervous systems are in overdrive. The Gallup data backs it up, in that the majority of leaders are fatigued to the point of burnout. Her advice: we can be fast, efficient, and grounded, all at once — but only if we let ourselves rest, and go at a pace we can actually sustain. Thank you for giving us the permission Lise, to take this AI journey at a pace our nervous systems can cope with. It’s summer in Europe. I think I see more gelato, spritzes in the sun and hikes in the mountains are in my immediate future. Work can wait.
7. We need to consciously engineer the future we want to see.
James E. Varnham, FLPI and @Cristina Muhl continued the ‘sustainable pace’ thinking, with their take on why AI transformation can fail in large organisations – it’s not just about the tools and how they’re being used, but also because the organisation isn’t prepared for or leading the change management process. They put language to the fear in the room: we can’t predict the future, and the hype only makes the confusion worse. I really felt that piece! Dr. Claudia GROSS – ExChange Facilitator also shone a light on the military/machine/money nature of the words we use to talk about change (evoking feelings of fear, scarcity and helplessness), and how powerful language can be when we’re shaping the future of our work. Mind-blowing realisations about the words we use everyday and don’t even think twice about. Every day truly was a school day at this conference. Thank you James, Christina and Claudia for more layers of learning around what we need to keep in mind about consciously creating the future of work – not just letting it happen willy nilly!
The resounding theme for me, was HOPE.
Courtesy of Anke Paulick we were reminded that in every major shift (the Industrial Revolution, the Digital Revolution) everything changed, and every time, more jobs were created than destroyed. The pattern isn’t new. What’s new is the speed. The humans who lead this well, those who bring people, community, and nervous-system-aware leadership back to the corporate table, are the ones who will shape what comes next so it works best for us humans. That’s the work we have to focus on now. Not resisting the change. Building the version of it where humans can human better.
Walking into an event like this is hard when you’re a foreigner and literally know no-one, and to be honest I promised myself I’d stay the first day but take a day to see Berlin if I wasn’t inspired to join the second. The opposite was true – there was such an open environment full of friendliness, kindness and willingness to make outsiders feel welcome, I (happily) didn’t ‘tourist’ in Berlin at all. Thank you ICF Germany Charter Chapter e.V. for gathering such a fabulous group of people together for this event and fostering such a beautiful community. Also, heartfelt thanks to Anna Bernhardt, ICF ACC and ACTC for (unbeknownst to me) stealing my phone to take group selfies. They were a joy and a delight to rediscover as I was sorting through my photos of the event this week.
To ICF Germany, and Event Facilitators Mar Cano Mesa and Dorothée Oung, thank you for delivering a learning experience that has fundamentally changed the way I see the future of work, my business, and the lives we have in front of us to create!
Hallo! If you’re curious about the ideas explored in this article and how I might be able to help, please book in for a quick (complimentary) chat! Every client is different, which is why I have lots of different ways of helping – whether it’s an upcoming event, free resources on my website or one to one coaching, let’s work out the best fit for you and your unique scenario!
Continue the Learning
If you’d like to explore these ideas further, the resources below may be a helpful next step.
Further Reading
If this topic has sparked your thinking, you may find the following articles helpful. Each explores a different aspect of creating learning experiences that are engaging, practical, and meaningful.
Why do we need to rethink workplace learning?
In this article, Maria unpacks why so much learning fails to land, from death by PowerPoint and tick and flick online courses, to chaotic induction processes and outdated, top down, lecture style workplace cultures.
Everyone’s a Teacher
Maria Doyle’s book Everyone’s a Teacher explores the principles behind engaging, effective learning experiences. It introduces a practical methodology for making learning more interactive, memorable, and meaningful — whether you’re working with students, professionals, or teams.