The future of humans and AI in the digital workplace

There is an old question that philosophers never tire of: Which came first — the chicken or the egg? People have started to ask a similar one about the workplace. Which comes first —human intelligence, or the intelligence we are now building and accelerating like AI, agentic AI?

The answers vary due to many factors such as personality, expertise, perception and experience. Yet, one thing is sure. Work and collaboration are about to change. We are steadily moving from tool-based work to intelligence-driven ecosystems.

The earlier delays – a spreadsheet waiting to be filled or a search box waiting to be asked – are no longer acceptable. What is arriving now does not wait. It summarizes, recommends, drafts and increasingly acts, behaving less like an instrument and more like a digital teammate. People are no longer asking, “What can this tool do for me?” but “Who does what, when people and machines think together”? It is part of shaping a strategy for future development but even more relevant to leverage this strategy into operational outcomes that bring value to the workplace and your customers too.

Decoding intelligence: The Howard Gardner perspective

Four decades ago, the psychologist Howard Gardner argued that intelligence is not one general ability but a plurality that is linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal and, later, naturalistic. Intelligence, in other words, was always an ecosystem, not a single score. And you have all of them, but just different levels of maturity, experience and mastery of them.

Gardner also floated a tentative ninth candidate: existential intelligence. This is the capacity to pose and ponder the big questions of meaning, purpose and ethics. Essentially: Why do we do what we do at all? That ninth intelligence turns out to be the most commercially relevant of all. It is precisely the terrain that machines do not occupy. They lack the judgement to decide what is worth doing, and the wisdom to decide why.

Seen this way, artificial intelligence (AI) is not an outsider crashing the system. It is a new, co-existing intelligence, built by human intelligence, trained on what humanity has written and made. The interesting future is not human versus machine, but how this new intelligence takes its place alongside the other nine.

The shift that matters

When it comes to business, the change might be rather very simple.

AI is absorbing all the “work about work” like the status updates, look-ups, reformatting and hand-offs. And in doing so, it is giving that time back to judgement, synthesis and decisions. Early field evidence already shows that an individual working with AI can deliver an output similar to one from a team of two humans. This gives the subject matter experts (SMEs) the space and time to produce more balanced, less siloed solutions.