The Human Skills AI Can't Replace

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About this episode.

Eran Thomson spent his career in advertising, from copywriter to creative director at agencies including BBH and TBWA, and co-founded a Sydney agency that sold in 2014. Then he built PowerProv, which uses the fundamentals of improvisation to teach business teams the things nobody else teaches them: communication, connection, collaboration, creativity, confidence. In Episode 4, Matt Perry and Rob Cannon, PhD talk to him about what AI is doing to those skills. He describes watching a strategy director produce insights at remarkable speed, then being unable to explain any of the thinking when asked a single question. He names what he sees happening as cognitive offload and cognitive surrender, people defaulting to the tools before they do any thinking of their own. And he asks the question that lands hardest: the thing that used to take an hour now takes five minutes, so did you go for a walk, or are you just busier than ever?

Chapters

1. 00:00Intro
2. 02:56Improv, and the five C's
3. 04:26PowerProv: soft skills as a business
4. 06:15The engagement crisis
5. 07:05Cognitive offload and cognitive surrender
6. 08:34Colleagues messaging across a room
7. 10:52Building the tool that drives your own obsolescence
8. 13:10The advertising pyramid flips
9. 15:13The myth of the loose brief
10. 16:50The creator economy and the AI influencer
11. 22:48Google Maps and instant answers
12. 23:54The strategist who couldn't defend the thinking
13. 25:02Showing your working
14. 25:35Why we're called Average Robot
15. 27:58The snowboarding exercise
16. 29:29The ensemble mindset
17. 30:54What did you do with the other 55 minutes?
18. 34:22It's the we that makes it work
19. 36:44The graph of human connection

The book

The Elephant in the Algorithm is out later this year. Reserve your copy

Free tool

Where does your team actually sit on AI? Take the AI Readiness Assessment

Guest

Eran Thomson