Will AI Make Work More Human? The Choice Is Ours
I asked a partner at a consulting firm what he was doing with all the time AI had given him back.
He told me about the process of evaluating employees on his team, the review cycle that comes around every year. Evaluating a single person used to take him four hours: reading his notes, writing the memo, rewriting it after the discussion. He was responsible for ten people. That’s forty hours a year, gone. Now the whole thing takes him an hour. The machine drafts, he edits, done.
I asked the obvious question. What are you doing with those three hours per person you just freed up? Turning a thirty-minute conversation into a real one?
He paused. Then he said, “Actually, no. I’m just using it to get more of my stuff done.”
That pause is the whole story of this moment. The technology is already handing us time. What matters now is what we choose to do with it.
I explored exactly this with Bonnie Davis, co-author with Bijal Choksi of Still Human with AI. Bonnie has spent her career helping leaders build workplaces where people don’t just perform, they flourish. She confirmed something I’ve believed for a long time. The future of work isn’t being decided by the technology. It’s being decided by us.
The Miracle Hiding in Plain Sight
Bonnie opened with a statistic worth sitting with. On average, AI is giving people two and a half hours back every week.
Think about what that could be. More time for one’s wellbeing, family, relationships, or time for supporting colleagues. For a lot of people, she said, it feels like a miracle.
Here’s the catch. Most people are pouring that time straight back into their to-do list. Bonnie put it in a way I keep coming back to:
If you came into money all of a sudden, maybe you’d give some to charity, but you wouldn’t give it all away. Similar with your time. Don’t give it all away.”
Her advice was almost embarrassingly practical. Get clear on what flourishing actually means to you. Specifically. Then allocate the time and block it on your calendar. Because if it isn’t on the calendar, it doesn’t happen.
The invitation here is bigger than personal wellbeing. For leaders, it’s strategic. The most common complaint I hear from executives is, “I don’t have time to develop my people.” Here’s the time. Use it to develop others, rather than cranking out more of the same work.
Is AI Helping or Hurting Flourishing Right Now?
Bonnie’s answer was honest. It depends entirely on the choices humans make.
I’ve spent a lot of my career swimming in what feel like polarities. Profits or people. Success or happiness. I’ve come to reject the premise. Here’s how I said it in the conversation:
Investing in your people can drive higher profits, if it is in line with a bigger purpose of service. If it’s only to not fall behind or not get fired, then there is a choice between profits and people. If you’re operating from a different place, then there is magic.”
The fear-based version of AI adoption carries a fatal flaw. Treat people purely as a cost to be minimized, and you forget that people are also the ones who spend money to buy things. Do that at scale and you eventually cut off your own revenue, while widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Two Futures, and the Choice Between Them
I asked Bonnie to imagine it’s 2036 and everything has gone right. Her answer lifted the whole conversation. We’re solving problems that once felt unsolvable. Medicine that understands not just the research but your specific body and needs. Root causes of hunger and poverty cross-referenced against the world’s best expertise, instead of another band-aid on a symptom. I think about humans in Iron Man suits, technology that amplifies our humanness rather than replacing it.
Then I asked another question. What does the wrong path look like? Short of the catastrophic robots-take-over scenario, the real danger is quieter: loneliness, disconnection, fear, and the slow loss of meaning.
In her words: “Life feels hollow, not human. There’s just an emptiness and a hollowness.”
Your very best moments in life were almost certainly not spent scrolling on your phone. If we’re not intentional right now, we risk losing more of those moments. That’s the moral imperative sitting in front of every leader today.
The Seven Flourishing Factors and the Human Value Proposition
Bonnie and Bijal Choksi built a framework of what they call the seven flourishing factors. They are:
- Purpose and Values
- Process and Rituals
- Relationships and Community
- Growth and Recognition
- Well-being
- Communication
- Generative Leadership
In the age of AI, she argues, these have shifted from nice to have to need to have.
The one that struck me hardest sits inside purpose. Most of us know the employee value proposition. It answers a simple question: what do employees get from working here? Compensation, flexibility, perks, career growth, benefits. All of this is important, but what it never actually calls out is that humans are needed here, in addition to the bots.
The human value proposition does exactly that. It says plainly that we need and value human beings, that they will grow and contribute no matter what the technology is, and that we will always find ways to bring out the strengths and meaning only humans can bring. It answers the questions people are quietly asking themselves right now: Will I still matter? Will I still develop? Will relationships disappear? No matter where the technology goes, humans will always have a place here. Leaders become the stewards of that value, protecting what AI can’t replicate, empathy, judgment, creativity, connection.
Loneliness, Relationships, and the Three Zones
Here’s the backdrop that makes this urgent. Loneliness at work is already an epidemic. Roughly one in ten people report loneliness at work, and AI, deployed carelessly, can make people feel even more alone and unseen. Trust drops too. Was that “great job” email from my boss written by my boss, or by a bot? When more of our interactions run through machines, our flourishing takes the hit.
When Bonnie described how to roll out AI without breaking trust, she gave the clearest guidance I’ve heard. Her book names three zones: connection, precision, and transformation. The connection zone is where you decide, in advance, what you will never hand to AI.
Take Bonnie’s example – Performance feedback. You can use AI to sum up and understand what’s been going on around someone’s performance, but do not take that AI-generated summary, copy and paste it into an email, and tell someone here’s your feedback. Engage the person in a conversation, ask them questions and use really good listening skills.
Generative Leadership and the 20 Percent
The seventh factor is generative leadership, and it ties everything together. Bonnie described it as leadership with forward motion. It generates new ideas, develops people, and prioritizes long-term value over the quick efficiency win. The leaders who make thoughtful choices about AI now are the ones whose organizations will still stand in ten years.
At the heart of it is what she calls change fluency. Not change management, which assumed a stable state you nudge people toward. Fluency, because AI capability keeps doubling and stability is no longer on the menu. Learning agility becomes the core skill, the ability to take what you know and apply it to the next thing, forever.
We used to give people twenty percent of their time for their own projects. The version we need now might be twenty percent free space simply to learn. If the future belongs to AI-native organizations, and you’re not giving people the time and psychological safety to experiment together, you’re playing a losing game.
Bonnie pushed further. Learning has to become a team sport. The days of designing a course on AI are over, because by the time it’s ready it’s obsolete. Organizations have to become micro-universities that capture learning in the moment and reward it as it happens. When you recognize something, you get more of it.
The Choice Is Ours
I keep returning to that partner’s pause. The one who saved forty hours and gave them all back to his task list without meaning to. That’s not a failure of character. It’s a failure of intention, and it’s completely fixable.
Bonnie reminded me that this is not about being right or wrong. It’s about opening the dialogue. Sitting your team down and asking honestly: Are we flourishing? What can we celebrate? What do we need to work on?
AI will not decide whether the future of work stays human. We will. The technology is already handing us the time. The only question left is whether we have the courage to spend it on what makes us most alive.
I encourage you to listen to my full conversation with Bonnie Davis on the Flourishing Edge podcast to come away with a practical map for this moment: how to reclaim the time AI gives back instead of surrendering it, how to name the work that must stay human, how to protect relationships and trust as you scale AI, and how to lead in a way that keeps your people learning, connected, and flourishing.
Learn more about Bonnie Davis on LinkedIn.
Listen to the podcast with Ashish and Bonnie Davis. above, You can also listen on Apple Podcasts.
Access and subscribe to all of the episodes of the Flourishing Edge Podcast here.
Make Flourishing Your Competitive Edge.
