While intelligence has been commoditized, genuine insight and risk-taking remain human strengths.

Human agency is essential for making meaningful choices.

The future favors the agentic—those who pause and choose deliberately.

Few forces in recent times have changed how people and organizations navigate the world or make decisions as profoundly as artificial intelligence. In just the past year, the use of generative tools has surged across industries, mainly because of the promise of new productivity gains. But in the race to keep up, many of us are giving up our agency.

What started as a partnership with technology meant to extend human potential is now turning into a gradual handover of the very judgment that got us to this point.

When change happens faster than we can keep up with or understand, what keeps us human is agency. I define agency as the capacity to explore different options and make deliberate choices under pressure, anchored by the belief that those choices matter. And it may be one of the most endangered capacities of the decade.

Intelligence is no longer a competitive advantage

For most of history, those who could understand, memorize, analyze, and connect information had an edge, but that advantage is now shrinking rapidly as cognitive power is commoditized by AI. Machines now produce output that once required whole teams or years of training at a fraction of the time and cost.

What AI can’t do, at least for now, is generate genuinely first-order insight. It can draft a compelling case for almost anything, but recognizing a real opportunity early, when the data is thin and the social risk is high, requires a willingness to choose, test, revise, and live with the consequences. In other words, what matters now is less what you know and more how you choose when the knowing is limited.

The illusion of progress

When........

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