In the AI era, growth depends on people, not tech

The discussion quickly unraveled. Despite strong technical progress, the team had given little thought to how employees would adopt, use, and adapt to the new tools. The assumption was that technology was the solution, rather than designing for the people and outcomes the company needed to be future-fit.

We’re hearing some version of this story from the majority of the organizations we speak with. They’re sprinting to implement new technologies, but few are fundamentally rethinking how their teams learn, collaborate, and adapt. The result is a growing gap between technological capability and human capacity, driven by tech-first initiatives. And in that gap lies the real risk: technology will keep advancing, but without adaptable people, processes, and systems, organizations will struggle to turn potential into progress.

We know, because we’ve seen it before. Over the last four decades, we’ve watched many companies jump on new technology without considering what it will mean for their workforce. The organizations that thrive in this new era won't be those that automate fastest, but those that adapt fastest. Category leadership and growth will come from distinctly human strengths—creativity, curiosity, empathy, and agility—unlocked by leaders who create the conditions and structures for them to flourish.

Here are those five strengths, and ways smart leaders can set employees up to thrive through moments of change.

1. Creativity 

Gen AI is only too happy to give us the answers. But by embracing human creativity, we can ask the right questions, make the right connections, and find innovative new solutions for our most pressing challenges.

Creativity gained quite a bit of traction as a business priority in the digital era, when an IBM study of more than 1,500 CEOs named it the single most important skill for leaders. Now consistently included in the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report as a “skill workers need to thrive,” creativity is something the whole workplace should embrace. Achieving long-term sustainable competitive advantage will require shifts in corporate behavior, like encouraging teams to borrow and remix concepts from entirely different parts of the business to stimulate new ideas; asking more questions to push beyond business-as-usual; and brokering conversations outside of self-made silos should become the norm. 

What does that look like? A few years ago, H&M Group came to us for help reducing overstock. The company was constantly running out of small t-shirts in-store and had a surplus of large ones. The first answer could have been to simply stock more small t-shirts. Instead, we got curious about the root cause, asking questions across the business—everyone from the designers themselves to garment suppliers, logistics managers, and in-store employees—to understand why the problem existed in the first place. It turned out, there were many different systems across the supply chain that simply weren’t talking to each other. By bringing curiosity, we identified and solved the real problem, and by applying a creative approach, we created and piloted an algorithm that not only reduced overstock by 22 percent but also increased sales by 34 percent.

To achieve defensible growth in this new era, we’ll need to combine irreplaceable human curiosity with emerging tech tools and foster the conditions for leaders to be more imaginative in how they solve challenges. The companies that do so will move beyond short-term efficiency gains toward more innovative thinking, ultimately leading to better solutions and, in turn, better toplines.

2. Human insight 

Human insight is what turns data into differentiation. AI can rapidly reveal what is happening in a system—the spikes, dips, bottlenecks, and patterns that form the surface-level story. But it will flatten the nuance of why those patterns exist in the first place. It won’t show you how they appear in the lives of the people behind them. And it won’t uncover the ingenious workarounds people invent to navigate systems that don’t fit their needs. This is where human insights are most valuable. And every one of those insights represents an outsized opportunity for design. As AI makes sophisticated analytics more accessible, human insight is fast becoming one of the most valuable differentiators a business can invest in.

Our work with an EdTech disruptor demonstrates this power. A few years ago, before the introduction of gen AI, a startup came to us looking for help creating an AI writing tool. Though at the time EdTech companies were in a tight race to get to market first, the client team wanted to make sure they were creating a tool that educators and students would really want to use. So, we went into classrooms, researching and co-designing with teachers and students who were very clear about what they wanted. Students weren’t looking for a tool that could write for them; they wanted a boost to get past the blank page. And teachers really wanted to provide personalized feedback for each assignment, despite heavy course loads. Together, we built Ethiqly, a writing tool that makes suggestions to help students organize their thoughts without replacing the critical thinking crucial to their learning, and drafts teacher feedback based on criteria they set for their classes (which students never see without teacher signoff). 

This is the value of human insight: it helps teams design the right things in creative, transformative ways that meet real needs. It ensures that organizations solve the right problem. And it grounds decisions in deep human understanding.

For leaders, this means treating human insight as a core organizational capability—not a research phase, not a niche discipline, and not a “nice-to-have.” It requires anchoring insight rituals in leadership meetings, reshaping organizations to codify human insight into your operating system, and creating structures that support ongoing contact with the real people your organization serves. It means rewarding curiosity at the moments that matter. And above all, it means recognizing that the organizations that thrive will be those that pair the speed of AI with deep human understanding. Leaders who make space for that understanding won’t just build better products and services—they’ll build companies that remain relevant, resilient, and genuinely connected to the world they are shaping.

3. Growth mindset

When technology rewrites the rules every week, the need for certainty becomes a liability. What teams need instead is a growth mindset: an instinct for curiosity and the belief that, with the right strategy in place, running experiments will not only help them learn, but also help them develop and grow. Even in the face of setbacks. That mindset isn’t just critical for navigating AI shifts; it’s the foundation for adapting to any moment of rapid change. Whether you’re activating a new strategy or going through a complete restructuring, you’ve got to be able to unlock maximum performance from your teams—and make them believe they can achieve it.

Building belief through experimentation is an early expression of a new way of working and gets people thinking not only, “we can do this,” but “this is going to help us grow in ways we can’t even imagine yet.”

Take Ford, for example. We supported former CEO Jim Hackett through Ford’s transformation from a 115-year-old carmaker into a future-fit mobility provider by helping teams build belief through a series of explicit “beacons”—experiments that created permission for teams to pilot, learn, and adjust. Commercial Vehicles was one of our areas of focus; Ford identified its market-leading transit vans as a key opportunity space. Through a series of prototypes and two-week sprints, we built a pilot for a new, connected security service, which ultimately became a $100 million joint venture with the IT security company ADT. The team’s growth mindset was part of what enabled the Commercial Vehicles division’s shift from selling vehicles to delivering integrated, data-driven solutions. And more broadly, they were empowered by a CEO who explicitly granted permission from the top to challenge existing ways of working and learning from what did and didn’t work. It’s that permission that will be crucial to help employees discover and adopt new ways of working in the face of rapidly changing technology and systems.

4. Psychological safety 

Of course, none of the above will deliver what you need if teams don’t have the space to experiment, which brings us to our next strength: psychological safety. If a growth mindset is the fuel for adaptability, psychological safety is the ignition. Whether you’re running the company or working at mid-level, your teams will only take smart risks when they trust they won’t be punished for speaking up or trying something new. 

Creating these conditions requires real talk and acknowledgment of team dynamics, designing new rituals to shift those behaviors, and—as is often the case in our work—making tangible interventions or prompts to help the behaviors stick. Recently, we worked with a global professional services firm on another beacon project for culture change. The task was to help them up the ante on how they deliver a world-class visitor experience. The challenge was that the visitor experience wasn’t delivered by our client’s firm itself, but by four groups of service providers from four external partners. 

By interviewing and observing the four groups, we discovered that no one felt comfortable sharing openly, especially when it came to being honest about problems. There was also no forum where they could all come together for even basic conversations about how to collaborate. So, we piloted an incredibly simple ritual with them: a daily standup meeting that gave us a platform to encourage conversation. But perhaps the biggest unlock in that pilot (and something you can start doing today) was having members of the leadership team there to model the desired behaviors. Showing up and openly narrating uncertainty (“Here’s what I don’t know yet”) and inviting dissent (“What are we missing?”) set the tone for others to follow suit.

Throughout the pilot, we captured conversation patterns via a digital dashboard prototype to ensure a consistent meeting agenda and to make it easy to follow up on action items. Post-pilot analysis showed a clear shift from an “us-and-them” mindset to more proactive visitor-centric actions, consistent feedback loops, and a sense that the four partners were part of one team working together.

In a world where change and uncertainty are constant, whether driven by advancing technology or other factors, psychological safety is the condition that gives your team the space to think creatively, the belief they can do it, and the confidence to reject the status quo in service of growth.

5. Culture of change  

Change is no longer a project—it is the daily rhythm of modern organizations. Treating it as an episodic event with a beginning, a middle, and an end will leave companies perpetually behind. Leaders need to build cultures where adaptability is practiced every day, where every person knows how to respond, influence, and move forward amid uncertainty.

That begins with a focus on change literacy: the mindsets, tools, and systems that enable an organization to collectively understand, interpret, and actively shape change. It enables your teams to read situations, articulate why change matters, experiment with new ways of working, and scale what works. When this capability is concentrated, change is slow, fragile, and dependent. But when it’s distributed—when teams understand and embrace that culture of change—it becomes a shared mission rather than a top-down mandate.

A powerful and enduring example comes from our decade-long partnership with Intercorp in Peru. What began as a strategic engagement to explore ways to empower an emerging middle class in a growing economy evolved into a deep cultural transformation across more than two dozen enterprises. We built an innovation lab with teams that created entirely new businesses through research, co-creation, and a relentless focus on design-led experimentation. Intercorp shifted from a traditional corporate structure to a culture where people at all levels were empowered to test ideas, model new behaviors, and shape the organization’s evolution. The result wasn't a single transformation, but a sustained effort to reimagine everything from pharmacies and banks to health clinics and schools.

When organizations invest in a culture of change, transformation stops being disruptive and starts becoming a habit. People move faster, teams stay aligned, and companies develop the collective capacity to evolve at speed—essential components for fluency in continuous change required to match the pace of AI today. Leaders can invest in the most cutting-edge technology and tools, but if their employees don’t exist within a culture that embraces change and empowers the humans within the system, these investments will fall flat.

Under the pressures of constant, unrelenting, and accelerating change and hype, it is tempting for leaders to focus solely on technology investments. After all, the gains that AI promises will be extraordinary, and everyone wants to get out in front. But implementing technology alone will not deliver the outcomes everyone is looking for. True transformation designs for the humans in your organization and ensures they are set up for success.

We know because this isn't the first time we've been here. The cycle of new, emerging technology repeats. And we know from our long history of working with successful clients—like Ford, Intercorp, and many others—that the organizations that embrace technology while doubling down on these human strengths are the ones that succeed. Because it is the people, not just the technology, that will ensure your organization thrives in the age of AI.