A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece called "How many people can I fire?".
For some reason, it upset a number of folks who don't agree there will be job cuts and massive shifts from AI. I had quite a few emails - and believe it or not, I really like it when people write in with what they think.
But if you read the entire article, you'd have seen that I actually said the volume of how many people can be fired is the wrong question to be asking. It's basic. Infant level.
If the limit of your vision is merely, 'ooh shiny tech, I can get rid of some people,' then you sit in the Homer Simpson school of AI.
The right question...
...is: what can I do now that I could not do six months ago?
As you know, I lead a company called The Proposition. We help companies with growth challenges through a number of methods.
For ages, the website has needed better SEO, the Generative Engine Optimisation and a number of new landing pages. I looked at hiring someone. I then asked Claude, the AI tool to do it for me.
It asked me a few questions, I went to bed and in the morning it was done. Now there were some errors, so I told it to go and fix those - and it did. Have a look. There are a few issues to iron out, but we're nearly there.
Claude has also:
- edited my new children's book, The Adventures of Clumsy Terry, and another book I've been working on for far too long.
- created landing pages and campaigns - A/B tested - and aquired attendees for the US webinars
- built the City CIO Club website, the forms, the CRM we need and the backend system to manage members.
- built a diagnostics tool to assess your source of growth and help you understand where to lean in to make more money. This is tied to a Google Ads campaign.
It has removed massive amounts of friction - and that's before we talk about orchestration, which we'll do in another post.
The result is being able to reach more people, test more campaigns in less time and far less admin.
More or less?
I'm telling you this because the shift is about being able to do vast amounts of work.
I was just on the phone with a CEO leading a bespoke software company that is inundated with enquiries as companies have realised they are no longer shackled to the dogshit standards SaaS companies have made them suffer.
Instead, they now want their own high-quality software, made with AI, delivered by agents, orchestrated by people who know who understand their business.
A single operator can now run hundreds of marketing campaigns simultaneously. Because software is now very cheap, they can build new products, positioning, publishing content and restructuring a website, producing client-ready materials and handling outreach all in the same week.
The skills that matter in this environment are the ones that let you operate at that expanded capacity without losing quality, judgement or commercial grip.
So here's my take on the eight skills you need to be coaching or hiring into your team.
Parallel capacity
Leadership used to be sequential. You worked on one initiative, finished it or handed it off, then moved to the next.
AI has made that model obsolete. The production layer of multiple work streams can now run at the same time while you provide direction, make calls and supply the judgement the technology cannot.
The leader who can run six propositions simultaneously, steering the output and knowing when to go deeper versus when to let the machine run, will outproduce an entire team operating the old way.
The mental discipline this requires is closer to running a live production than managing a project plan, and it is a skill that improves rapidly with practice once you stop thinking of yourself as a manager and start thinking of yourself as a producer.
Switcher thinkers will do well here.
Judgement
The scarce capability is knowing when the output is good enough to ship and when it needs your hand on it. Using the tools is getting easier by the month and will continue to get easier, which means tool proficiency on its own is worth less with every passing quarter.
The leader who can look at an AI-generated strategy document and instantly see that it is fluent but hollow is worth more than ten people who can write a good prompt.
The premium now sits with the person who has enough taste and experience to separate substance from filler.
Creative courage
AI has collapsed the distance between idea and execution so dramatically that the only thing standing between a good instinct and a finished product is the willingness to start.
The leaders who will dominate the next economy are the ones who can see something that needs to exist, design it, build it with the tools at hand and ship it without waiting for a committee to approve a brief or a budget to clear.
Communication
AI can produce competent copy on demand, which means competent communication has become invisible. Adequate is now free and instant, and the bar for what actually lands with another human being has risen sharply as a result.
The leader who can write a message that makes someone act, hold a room without hiding behind slides and run a conversation that builds genuine trust will stand out in ways that were harder to achieve when good communication was scarcer.
Authority, warmth and precision in working together is the combination.
Compression
If your capacity to produce has increased fivefold, your ability to communicate what you have built needs to keep pace. The leaders who win attention in this environment are the ones who can land a point in fewer words.
Brevity signals clarity of thought and confidence - and if you cannot explain what you are building and why it matters in two paragraphs you have not yet understood it well enough.
The ability to compress is the ability to move faster..
Value selling
Transactional selling with people in the middle is heading for extinction.
Anything where the buyer is comparing a spec sheet against a price will be automated out of existence once AI handles procurement matching, comparison and negotiation at scale.
The leaders who are already outbuilding their competitors are running consultative conversations that diagnose problems clients had not fully seen and connecting them to outcomes worth paying a premium for.
That is value selling in its purest form, and it is rapidly becoming the minimum standard for anyone in a commercial role.
Commercial numeracy
When you can build faster you need to make sharper go or no-go calls. The ability to model a scenario quickly, pressure-test an assumption with real numbers and know instinctively when a business case is lying to you becomes critical at the speed the new economy demands.
AI makes it trivially easy to generate plausible-looking financial models that collapse the moment someone with real commercial instinct pushes on them.
The leader who can glance at a forecast and tell within minutes whether the assumptions underneath it are honest or wishful will save more money and make more money than any efficiency programme ever designed.
Critical thinking
The ability to find the weak joint in a case that looks airtight is becoming the highest-value cognitive skill in business.
AI can produce beautifully reasoned arguments for almost any position, complete with supporting data and a confident tone, and the proposals that will cost you the most are the ones that look rigorous but carry a flawed premise buried three layers deep.
The intellectual habit of asking what would have to be true for this to be wrong before committing resource is the discipline that holds the whole system together, and it applies as much to your own output as it does to anyone else's recommendations.
The vision divide
The question you ask determines the company you build.
The leader who asks how many people they can cut will get a smaller company. The leader how big they can grow with the new tools will get a bigger company.
Nuff said, yeah?