From a conversation with Sumner Bacon, Partner at Bain & Company, on the EveryDay AI podcast
I’ve spent my career making technology accessible to people who would rather not think about it. As the Actionable Futurist, I get asked the same questions in boardrooms from London to Singapore: Is AI going to take our jobs? How do we actually start? And who on earth is going to lead us through this?
In a recent conversation with Sumner Bacon, Partner at Bain & Company, I had a chance to pull together some of the thinking I’ve gathered across hundreds of client engagements. Here’s what I shared, and why it matters to you right now.
AI Slices Tasks. It Doesn’t Delete Humans.
The framing I keep coming back to is this: your job is not a monolith. It is a series of tasks. Some of those tasks need your judgement, your empathy, your relationships, your creative instinct. Others are narrow, repetitive, and frankly shouldn’t be taking up your time in the first place.
AI slices those tasks out.
Think about expense approvals. Your manager is spending two or three hours a week reviewing receipts, cross-referencing against policy, clicking approve. That is not a good use of their brain. When AI absorbs that kind of work, nobody loses their job. They get their Thursday afternoons back. That is a win.
The phrase I push back on is “AI won’t take your job, someone who knows how to use it will.” That’s partly true. But here’s the fuller picture: AI will demand better humans. When the AI handles the information gathering at speed and scale, the question becomes what you do with near-perfect information. Do you act on it with judgement? With empathy? With courage? Those are irreducibly human capabilities, and they are about to matter more than ever.
The Invisible Intelligence Hiding in Your Organisation
One of the concepts I’ve been developing is what I call invisible intelligence. It’s the data that already exists in your systems but is never surfaced at the right moment.
Here’s an example. A regular customer walks into a restaurant. They prefer a particular table. They always order a specific wine. They tend to come on Thursdays and bring three guests. That intelligence exists somewhere in the booking system, the POS, the loyalty app. But no human can possibly recall all of that for every customer walking through the door. AI can. And when it surfaces that intelligence at exactly the right moment, the customer feels known, and the human serving them gets to be the hero of that experience.
The data is already there. The insight is invisible. AI makes it visible. That’s the opportunity sitting inside most organisations right now.
The CEO of a Fifth-Generation Family Business Who Got It in Three Hours
Sceptics are my favourite audience. I was brought in to work with a family-run business in Carlisle. Seventeen department heads in the room, a CEO who was very precious about the fact that his people-first culture was what made his company special. I was warned he’d be difficult.
Before I arrived, I asked for their SWOT analysis. It was a 17,000-cell Excel worksheet. While I was ironing my shirt that morning, I put it into my AI tool and asked it to identify the AI opportunities across every department. By the time I walked in, I had a comprehensive, structured view of where they could act.
I asked Ian, the chief strategy officer, how long it had taken him to produce his analysis. Ten days, he said.
I told him I’d done it before breakfast.
We spent the next three hours going department by department through the opportunities. The CEO who’d walked in arms-folded had eight pages of notes by the first coffee break. His HR director nearly hugged me when she realised she could do the same with her pulse survey data.
These weren’t technologists. They had no idea AI could work as a decision partner. They thought it was for dodging parking fines and polishing emails. What I showed them is that it can turn data into insight in the time it takes to make a cup of coffee.
Start with what you already have. The data is there.
Finding Your Wally
I use a simple analogy that lands every time. Do you remember Where’s Wally? Or Where’s Waldo, if you’re reading this from across the Atlantic. Those illustrations from the late 80s and 90s, a sea of noise, hundreds of lookalike characters, and somewhere buried in there is Wally: red and white striped top, cane, beanie.
One day I took one of those illustrations and put it into my AI. I asked it to find Wally and put a red circle around him.
Two seconds later. There was Wally.
Your organisation is a beach scene full of noise. Your market is. Your customer data is. The signal you’re looking for, the insight that could change your next quarter, is buried in there. AI can find your Wally. And when I show people that live, on stage, something shifts. They stop thinking about AI as a threat and start asking where their Wally is.
What to Ask Your Next C-Suite Hire
The CEOs of Coca-Cola and Walmart have both recently said publicly they are not the right people to take their organisations into the AI era. That takes courage to say. And they’re probably right, not because they can’t write a prompt, but because leading through AI transformation requires a fundamentally different mindset: comfort with uncertainty, ability to reimagine work from scratch, and willingness to make big bets on things that haven’t been done before.
When I’m advising on senior hiring, I ask two additional questions beyond the standard brief.
First: how do you stay curious? If the candidate thinks long and hard before answering, that’s a good sign. They’re actually reflecting, not just performing.
Second: what are you doing with AI right now? Not in a technical sense. Have you pushed the buttons? Have you tried agentic AI? Have you seen what happens when you give an AI a complex task and let it run?
If the answer to both is substantive, you may have found your person. If they look at you blankly, they are going to struggle.
Insight Without Action Is Just Theatre
This is where I differ from many of my futurist peers. Most of them are looking 20 to 50 years out. I love that work. I learn from it. But insight without action is theatre, and theatre doesn’t change how your organisation operates next quarter.
Every time I’m on stage, my final slide before the QR code is five things you need to do tomorrow. Not in a year. Not after the next board meeting. Tomorrow.
The same structure is in my book, Digitally Curious: every chapter ends with what I call the Curious Five. Five things to go and do, starting easy, getting progressively harder.
When someone comes up to me after a keynote and says “great talk,” I ask them: what will you do differently? Because if the answer is nothing, I’ve entertained them. I haven’t helped them.
The Three Things I’d Tell Every Parent Right Now
Sumner asked me what parents should be doing to prepare their children for the world that’s coming. He has a one-year-old son. It’s a question I get from stages regularly, and my answer is always the same three things.
First: raise critical thinkers. When I was six, my father would wire up lights with me and ask me why they were brighter in one configuration than another. He didn’t just give me the answer. He made me work for it. That habit of questioning the output, of asking how did we get here and is this right, is essential in an age where AI will deliver confident-sounding answers that are sometimes wrong.
Second: become comfortable as a public speaker. Not necessarily on a stage in front of thousands. But in every job you will ever have, you will need to convince someone of something using a story. A budget approval. A promotion conversation. A pitch. The ability to communicate clearly and with conviction is not going away.
Third: get comfortable with AI tools. Not as a technical skill. As a fluency. The same way we assume everyone is comfortable with email, organisations will soon assume the same of AI.
Those three together will keep you relevant through whatever comes next.
My Productivity Stack, If You’re Curious
Since Sumner asked: I use Perplexity as my primary AI tool because all my research and context is already in there, organised into spaces. I use deep research mode, not the quick answer, because I want the AI thinking harder, not just faster.
Otter.ai transcribes all my meetings and podcast conversations. My book, Digitally Curious, could not have been written without it. Sixty podcast guests, nearly sixty hours of audio, all searchable, all queryable.
And I use Raindrop.io as my bookmarking layer. Anything I clip from LinkedIn, an article, a report, goes in there. The developer has now built AI on top, so I can ask it to summarise everything I saved last month and surface what I should actually read. It’s the kind of invisible intelligence I talk about on stage, applied to my own knowledge workflow.
If all of that disappeared tomorrow, I could still do my job. It would just take me a great deal longer, and my insights wouldn’t be as sharp.
The Bottom Line
You cannot be a bystander in the AI era. You have to be an active participant. Not because the technology demands it, but because your competitors are in there, your team is in there, and the decisions that will define your organisation over the next three years are being shaped right now by people who are willing to play with the tools.
Get your hands dirty. Ask better questions. Focus on what you love, and automate the rest.
And if you want to go deeper, pick up a copy of Digitally Curious, or search those two words and you’ll find the podcast, the book, and a community of people who are choosing curiosity over fear.
That’s where the future is being built.
Andrew Grill is the Actionable Futurist, a globally recognised keynote speaker, AI strategist, and author of Digitally Curious.
