Stop asking what AI can replace. Start asking what it makes more valuable
I've been asking myself a slightly uncomfortable question recently.
How much of what I do for my clients could AI do?
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
It can research companies and markets. It can help identify prospects. It can write sales emails, suggest follow-ups, analyse a pipeline, help develop an ideal customer profile and put together a sales plan.
I use it myself for some of those things, so I'm certainly not going to write an article pretending otherwise.
But the more I've thought about it, the more I wonder whether we're asking the wrong question about AI.
Rather than constantly asking "What can AI replace?", perhaps we should be asking:
"What does AI make more valuable?"
Writing the email was never really the difficult bit
Sales is a good example.
AI can write a perfectly respectable prospecting email in seconds. In many cases, it'll probably write a better one than someone staring at a blank Outlook window for 20 minutes.
But writing the email isn't usually where the difficult decisions are.
Should we be contacting this company at all?
Are we talking to the right person?
Why would they care about this now?
Is there actually a reason to get in touch, or are we contacting them because their name happens to be on a list?
If they've opened three emails and haven't replied, should we follow up again?
Should we call them?
Leave them alone?
Try someone else?
And if nobody is responding, is the problem the email? Or have we got the wrong audience, proposition or approach altogether?
AI can certainly help answer some of those questions.
But making the decision requires context. It requires judgement. And quite often it requires knowing the business and the people involved.
That's where I've started to think things get interesting.
Perhaps we're about to see a Human Premium
For years we've referred to things like empathy, curiosity, communication and relationship-building as "soft skills".
I've never particularly liked the phrase, and it feels even less appropriate now.
There isn't much that's soft about telling a business owner that the thing they've spent the last six months doing probably isn't working.
Or asking the awkward question in a meeting.
Or recognising that the person you're talking to isn't really objecting to the price — they're worried about making the wrong decision.
Or knowing when someone needs another follow-up and when they need you to leave them alone.
Those are commercial skills.
And as AI makes some of the more functional parts of our jobs easier, faster and cheaper, I think these genuinely human abilities could become increasingly valuable.
I've started thinking about that as the Human Premium.
If everybody has access to technology that can research, write, summarise and analyse, those things become less of a differentiator.
What becomes more important is what we do with the information.
Our judgement.
The questions we ask.
Our ability to listen.
Our understanding of context.
Our willingness to challenge an assumption.
Our ability to build enough trust for another person to tell us what's really going on.
AI doesn't make those things redundant.
Arguably, it gives us more time to do them properly.
The opportunity isn't Human vs AI
I don't think businesses should be running away from AI.
Quite the opposite.
If something can save me two hours of manual research, I'd rather use it and spend those two hours talking to clients, thinking about their business or pursuing an opportunity.
If it can summarise information that would previously have taken half a morning to work through, brilliant.
If it can give me a useful first draft rather than starting with a blank page, I'll take that too.
The mistake, I think, would be assuming that because something can be automated, it automatically should be.
There's a useful question businesses could start asking about the work they do:
Automate it. Improve it. Or humanise it?
Automate it when the task is repetitive, administrative or doesn't particularly benefit from a person doing it.
Improve it when AI can help someone do the job faster or better, but human judgement still matters.
Humanise it when the outcome depends on trust, conversation, interpretation, empathy or understanding context.
In sales, CRM administration might sit firmly in the first category.
Research and preparing for a meeting might sit in the second.
The meeting itself belongs very firmly in the third.
The interesting part is going through a business and working out which is which.
What are we going to do with the time AI gives us back?
This might be the bigger question.
Imagine AI saves somebody five hours a week.
What happens to those five hours?
Do we simply give them another five hours' worth of tasks?
Do we use the saving to reduce headcount?
Or could some of that time be spent doing things we've gradually squeezed out of working life because everyone is so busy?
Talking properly to customers.
Following up with people.
Thinking.
Coaching somebody.
Picking up the phone.
Having a coffee with a client without an agenda.
Asking why something isn't working.
Listening to what somebody actually says rather than waiting for our turn to speak.
Building relationships before we need something from them.
That's the bit of the AI conversation I find much more interesting.
Productivity matters, of course.
But perhaps the real opportunity isn't simply to do more work with fewer people.
Perhaps it's to remove some of the work that machines are perfectly capable of doing so that people can spend more time doing the work they're uniquely good at.
Which brings me back to Everyone Says Hi!
This has made me think quite hard about my own business too.
If a client is paying me simply to research 100 companies or write 50 prospecting emails, then yes, increasingly there are tools that can do a lot of that work.
And I should be using them.
The value I want Everyone Says Hi to bring isn't the number of hours spent producing things.
It's knowing what we're trying to achieve in the first place.
Who we should be talking to.
Why they might care.
What's working.
What's stuck.
What we're missing.
When we need to change direction.
And sometimes saying, "I know you asked me to do X, but having looked at it, I actually think we should do Y."
AI can be an incredibly useful part of that process.
But it isn't the relationship.
It isn't the judgement.
And it isn't accountable for what happens next.
Maybe that's the recalibration we need to make.
Not humans or AI.
But humans getting much better at being human because AI is taking care of more of the other stuff.
After all, technology can help us find each other.
AI can help us prepare.
Automation can help us stay organised.
But eventually, someone still has to say hi.
Want to put your own commercial activity through the test?
During September, I'm offering a small number of Human Required sessions for businesses that want to take a fresh look at how they're approaching sales and business development.
We'll spend 45 minutes looking at what you're currently doing and asking three questions:
What should we automate?What could AI help us improve?And where would more human input actually make a difference?
We'll finish by identifying three practical changes I'd make.
No enormous AI transformation project. No complicated tech stack. And no requirement to work with me afterwards.
Just a useful look at where your time and energy are going and whether there's a better way to use both.
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