Loud noises by people standing on tables
If you've spent any time on LinkedIn lately you'll no doubt have heard that the sky is falling because of AI. The message is delivered in various ways, depending on who benefits. Sometimes it's reckless abandon: "The future of business is here, get on board or you're going to be left behind." Sometimes it's flat out threatening: "Everyone's about to be replaced, you're all relics, everything you thought you knew is about to be obsolete". Sometimes it's simply resignation: "It's inevitable." Whatever the latest take, it's hard to get excited about it.
The people who build software are currently standing on tables, shouting through megaphones, telling us that the world is moving so fast, that everything we know is irrelevant, and if we don't completely reinvent our entire careers by next Tuesday, we'll be left behind like a soggy old cardboard box in a dank alley. It is a narrative guaranteed to make a person feel exceptionally small.
The weight of some very big numbers
If you look at the numbers, you can see why they're shouting. The revenue behind the AI gold rush is staggering.
OpenAI, the company that blew the world away with its human-like chatbot, watched its annualized revenue run-rate (ARR) skyrocket from $6B in 2024 to an estimated $25B in spring of 2026. That's vertical growth at a scale the tech world has never seen before. Meanwhile, their main rival, Anthropic (the makers of Claude), entered global consciousness in January 2025 with a modest $1B run rate, which they scaled to $9B by December before completely exploding in 2026, where by May they posted an astonishing $47B ARR.
The corporate world has gone haywire. The latest data from the US Census Bureau shows a massive divide: while smaller businesses are still watching from the sidelines, half of large firms in knowledge-intensive sectors like finance and information have already begun to deploy these tools into their daily operations. According to Deloitte, a third of these organizations are actively trying to rewrite their core workflows and business models around AI, but more on that later.
A brief history of surviving the Apocalypse(s)
When faced with the headlines swirling around, you sit up and pay attention. If you're anything like me, you may have even battled the instinct to reach for a tinfoil hat, pull the blinds shut, and decide that the robot overlords have won.
But here's where it's worth taking a beat, pouring a cup of coffee, and remembering a few things about who we are. We are the adults in the room! I'm talking Gen X and Elder Millennials, people whose wardrobes have gone in and out of style at least a couple of times.
We remember the sound of the metallic scream of a dial-up modem. We are the ones who spent forty-five minutes waiting for a single song to download on Napster (only for it to turn out to be a completely different song). We survived the great Y2K panic of 1999, when we were told by newscasters with a straight face that grocery store scanners would melt, power grids would fail, and airplanes would fall out of the sky. We stocked up on Campbell's Chunky soup, tanks of water… and then the clock struck midnight and the world just kept turning.
We've been told countless times that the sky is falling, but the truth of the matter is that the sky stays where it always has.
The part where it hits the wall
Fearmongering works like a charm, or maybe it's a spell.. Everyone from the people getting clicks from shocking titles to the companies selling you the life raft profit immensely. A panicking person makes decisions they don't yet understand out of sheer desperation.
If you look past Open AI's impressive sales stats, the reality of what's happening after a company rolls out Copilot and says "use it" tells a different story. Buying software is easy; getting everyone on it, using it and running with it is hard. Right now, corporate AI adoption is running straight into a very expensive wall.
Gartner reports that up to 40% of advanced enterprise AI projects are on track to be abandoned because internal corporate data is too messy for the model to understand. And the tools that do get rolled out? Remember Deloitte finding one third of companies rewriting their workflows? Well, a staggering 84% of them have failed and abandoned ship. They handed everyone an expensive tool that amounted to idle software sitting on a server. And they're bound to try again.
Make no mistake: these tools have immense value. They summarize heaps of data in seconds, draft templates, and clear the neverending pile of admin clutter off your desk. Used effectively, AI has the ability to be a radical force multiplier for productivity - especially when the user is building with decades of lived experience. The combination is unstoppable.
Time out. Let me be completely clear. AI tools are not a replacement for a professional or their years of battle scars; they're an amplifier. A way for industry veterans to weave their experience into gold.
Highly confident, completely lost
The companies trying to swap out human judgment and creativity for an algorithm are realizing that without a person at the helm, the model generates fast, clever sounding, very expensive mistakes. AI will even deliver completely fake data with the friendly confidence of the country gas station attendant who happily sends you off in the wrong direction. He means well. He sounds like he knows what he's talking about. He believes it. But after you drive for an hour, you realize you are not where you should be, and now you have to go back, retrace your steps, make up for lost time, and start again. He wasn't malicious, he was just…eager..
Here's the unassailable truth that headlines don't capture: you cannot manufacture soul. Your distinct humanness matters right now, in this weird, overwrought, hyper-connected moment. More than it ever has.
When a machine can generate infinite paragraphs, infinite spreadsheets, and infinite code in a fraction of a second, the cost of technical execution drops to zero. And when the cost of execution drops to zero, the market value of the human being who clicks the button doesn't disappear, it just moves upstream.
"In April of this year, I saw a musician (and his cat) playing the accordion in Paris. Montmartre has always drawn musicians, writers, and painters, is the birthplace of the cabaret. Le Chat Noir opened there in 1881, attracting the luminaries of the emerging City of Light for 15 years and paving the way for Moulin Rouge a few years later. This three-piece — the accordion, the man, and his chat noir — is famous in these streets, and you don't even have to close your eyes to imagine them here 145 years ago."
Think of an orchestra. AI can confidently play every single instrument flawlessly, at lighting speed, all at the same time. It can even compose sheet music. But it can't be the conductor. It doesn't know why the music needs to be played, it can't feel the mood of the audience in the hall, understand the value of letting a note hang, pensive or forceful or triumphant or grieving, with the echo of the room. It has no soul to breathe life into the notes. It executes the performance, but you are the one who decides what the symphony is singing.
Certain human virtues simply cannot be replaced:
AI can analyze a billion data points, but it's never sat in a tense boardroom and navigated the complexity of an impending change. It lacks the scar tissue earned from surviving real economic winters.
Human relationships and trust matter more, not less. When things go sideways, a client with missing money doesn't want to type angrily in all caps to a software, they need a partner who can look them in the eye and say, "I've got your back, we'll figure this out". Accountability cannot be outsourced.
Because AI makes it effortless to create noise, the world is being flooded with polished mediocrity. The premium skill of the future is no longer production, it is curation. It's the wisdom to discern what's actually good, what's true, and what is best forgotten. The machine has the answers, but it has no taste.
Our stubborn refusal to become redundant
This isn't to say we aren't facing a destabilizing wave of change. We are, and it's unavoidable. It will be painful (much more on that transition in this series). But history reminds us we aren't the first generation to feel this specific vertigo.
Every generation has lived through its own version of this moment. The candle gave way to the lightbulb, the horse to the automobile to the self-driving car, the red-lit darkroom to Photoshop to apps on the phone. Architects traded their pencils and rulers for CAD software. Accountants traded their ledgers for spreadsheets, and became CFOs. In every case, the prediction was the same: people would become redundant. In every case, the prediction was wrong. The person using it became more powerful, not less. The software made the math faster, the tasks invisible, the effort meaningful and strategic. AI brings you ideas, knowledge, evidence, materials, ingredients, history, and you turn it into something entirely new. Something meaningful and strategic.
Open enrolment · TorontoCome learn the instrument.
A note on canned soup and conductors
So where do we go from here?
We tuck the tinfoil hat away. We roll up our sleeves, get curious, and we start to play. Not because we are blindly optimistic, or because some hyperactive CEO in Silicon Valley told us to, but because we've been through this before: the lightbulb, the automobile, the spreadsheet, and that is what we do. We didn't survive the dial-up scream and the great chunky soup panic of Y2K just to get bullied by a glorified spell-checker. The machine plays the instruments. You conduct the symphony. You have spent decades earning your stories, your scars, your taste, and your gut checks. None of that fits in an algorithm. So pick up the baton. It's time to play.