More ROI from AI or Humans?

Illustration generated with AI assistance using ChatGPT and DALL·E by OpenAI. Concept and article text by Vipin Labroo

The whole rationale behind deploying AI to the extent that it threatens to decimate whole professions is premised on the fact that it leads to much enhanced productivity, reduced costs and unprecedented profits. In other words, much more ROI or return on investment than would accrue if humans were employed to carry out the same tasks. But is it really the case that the ROI from using AI in place of humans is always higher? Let us take a look and try to assess if it is indeed like that.

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For all the hype and hoopla surrounding the rising adoption of AI across industries, the fact of the matter is that the ROI delivered by it is way below expectations. According to research carried out by Scaled Agile’s partner, Return on AI Institute; while 90% of organisations find that they derive some value from AI, only a minority are seeing significant economic impact. Even so, almost 60% of them have started slowing or reducing hiring, banking on future AI productivity gains. At the same time, only 2% of them have linked those decisions to actual results. This points to businesses perceiving more value from AI than actually realising it.

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AI Comes at a Cost

Transitioning to AI comes at a cost. Much of it is in the form of the consumption of natural resources like water and rare minerals, as well as damage to the environment on account of the large amount of electricity  required to be produced to make it functional. At the same time, there is a parallel loss of valuable human expertise that would have grown and matured over the years if not replaced by AI. Completely slamming the door on the face of human ingenuity and its ability to create wonders, and instead depending on AI, which hones its skills by studying past human achievements, may not be the bright idea that many think that it is.

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Comparing humans and AI is like comparing apples with oranges

AI has the ability to train on very large amounts of data. However when compared with how vast humanity is, this is a very small part of it. Given that about 80% of online content is available in only 10 languages out of 7000 spoken worldwide there is not much credibility in the claim of AI’s infallibility. This is on account of the fact that a language is more than a simple means of communication. It carries within itself the values, culture and way of life of a people. 

Training AI on a sanitised and restricted data set means that it is picking up the perspectives and biases of only a section of the world’s population.

​This will in no way enable AI to understand and appreciate the whole scale of the values, cultural landscapes and knowledge embodied in the human race that is 8 billion in number. AI may be supremely useful in the right circumstances, but that does not make it as intelligent as the human race.

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ROI on AI requires human support

In a scenario where AI use doesn’t begin to deliver ROI for 2 to 4 years, is it better to invest in human resources and develop and grow them over the years? In any case, organisations that do manage to show high ROI on their AI investment are the ones that have realised that a human centric business model works best in an environment where AI expertise is encouraged. The key learning over here is that AI performs best when it empowers people by transforming how they perform work. The focus here is on aiding the human work force to perform better and not on finding ways and means to replace people with technology on account of illogical FOMO felt by business houses around the world, driven by unfounded hype.

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Money Makes the Mare Go

Feeding the AI behemoth with astronomical investment in the hope of future super profits is not tenable, and more and more companies are realising it. Until the time AI comprehensively proves its worth as a viable business proposition for organisations across scale and geography, it makes way more sense for one to trust  and invest in people. That will get them more ROI in the near term, and who knows the long-term future as well. AI has as much chance of making people leave the workforce as the internet has had since its launch years ago. While AI will doubtless make its worth felt more and more, it will only do so with the help of people. There is no other way.

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Who cares about quality and authenticity when fluff is what everybody wants?

 

Illustration generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E via ChatGPT. Concept and prompt by the author.

In an era in which a real estate baron cum reality TV host known for outrageous comments and an absolute absence of scruples is elected the president of the most powerful country in the world and allowed to treat  nations across the globe as a doormat what is the incentive for people to put a premium on quality and authenticity? The advent of the internet age, which was supposed to usher in an age of egalitarianism where everyone was supposed to get a fair chance at achieving success backed only by talent and hard work, has actually enabled mediocrity, nepotism, fakery and plain nonsense to thrive at the cost of what is right, fair, true and genuine. A monstrosity called the algorithm has ensured that venal and corrupt individuals and greedy and rapacious organisations are able to direct people to serve their vested interests without  the latter even realising it.

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People no longer care to read or engage in deep conversations with anyone. Social media has had a decided role in uneducating people. Nobody cares to read a well-written newspaper editorial anymore. In fact, newspapers are closing down right, left and centre. Leading television channels are an arena for deafening slanging matches where not a single coherent argument is made or a convincing conclusion reached. The online media space has its own dedicated niches where people push their agendas safe in their respective echo chambers.

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Education has become a farce, with real estate builders and people with criminal antecedents opening schools, engineering colleges, medical colleges and universities at will, ripping off hundreds of thousands of gullible students and parents. The entrance tests to the educational institutions of repute are often compromised on account of repeated incidents of test-paper leaks. Mountains and forests are merrily destroyed in the name of development, never mind the poisoned rivers and air that are left in their wake.

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Tyrannical world leaders wage economic and real war to wreck a well-established and perfectly functioning world order, replacing it with global anarchy that could lead to economic collapse and anarchy in nations across the global south. Where have the statesmen and stateswomen of the world gone? Why are we allowing morons, goons and uncouth leaders to assume the mantle of leadership, when many of them really need psychiatric care?

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Of course, everybody talks like they crave authenticity. There is all this talk about following your passion and living mindfully. People are asked to share the stories of failure, hardship and redemption. But scratch the surface, and it is all fluff. People are pretentious and deceitful and not who they show themselves to be. Who would have thought that Bill Cosby, the avuncular comedian everyone doted on, would be such a monster? People like Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, as well as the many worthies named in Epstein Files, holding positions of immense authority, have been shown to have a fleet of clay. Whom can the people look up to for inspiration anymore?

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We may be living in the post-truth world, whatever that might mean, and it's possible that people have always been like this, with the lid coming off what was always the way of the world. However, isn’t there a definite feeling that something is off? Like everybody, the whole human race is more diminished than it used to be in the past.

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Man landed on the Moon in 1969, and it was truly a remarkable feat-the culmination of the rise of humans from the forests and caves of their distant past to truly celestial glory. Come 2026 and they send humans to the Moon only to circle it and not touch down. What did anyone feel about that event? Not even deja vu, it came, and it went.

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We don’t put writers, philosophers and scientists on a pedestal. Instead, we worship social media stars with millions of followers whose claim to fame might be crazy and outlandish antics and the ability to shock decent people on account of their facility with expletives. We have passed the stage of expecting there to be a rebound to a world where honest, hard working, decent and competent people would inevitably make it to the top. They cannot. The system is loaded against them. We have reached critical mass in terms of irretrievably being drawn into a morass of mediocrity, dishonesty, gaslighting, conspicuous consumption, and a false sense of entitlement. Far from nursing a damaged moral compass back to health, the world has thrown it away.

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Will AI replace ghostwriters?

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

 With AI decimating jobs and professions across the board, does ghostwriting have any chance of standing up to the juggernaut? For GenAI technology with its multifarious capabilities, ghostwriting is probably low-hanging fruit when it comes to replacing human beings. That may really be bad news for the thriving ghostwriting industry currently valued at $1.42 billion and projected to reach $2,23 billion by 2030. But are things really that way for ghostwriters, and is it really the end of the road for them? The facts seem to suggest otherwise. Far from damaging the prospects for ghostwriters, digital technology has seen a sharp growth in demand for their services as more and more individuals, organisations, and businesses are communicating more and more with their audiences.

​From businesses seeking to engage and win over their customers and clients with content that speaks to the latter’s needs to thought and opinion leaders seeking to build up their brand image, ghostwriting is seeing a steady increase in demand.  From would- be authors seeking to self-publish to creators and influencers- a whole range of people and organisations would gladly pay for the services rendered by a ghost writer. Prince Harry’s much talked about best sellerSpare was, for instance, ghost written by JR Mochringer, apparently for a $1 million fee.

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The Entry of AI

While there is an undeniable boom in the growth of the ghostwriting industry, is there impending  doom on the horizon in the shape of AI writing tools, making it possible for anyone to churn out any form of written content, almost at will? The thing about using GenAI to write for you is that the quality of output entirely depends on the quality of input. If somebody outsourced writing work to a ghostwriter in the past  because they didn’t possess the required writing skills, then how could they now be expected to provide the ideal brief or set of prompts required to obtain high-quality content? A ghostwriter, on the other hand, is a living flesh-and-bone human being who can have a conversation with his client and draw out what it is that he or she wants to convey through a piece of writing.

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AI-generated content often lacks soul because it is essentially regurgitated, lacking emotional depth and genuine insight. It, therefore, comes across as flat and mechanical, akin to how Schwarzenegger speaks in a mechanical drawl in the Terminator series of movies. Would someone wanting to author a memoir collaborate with AI to bring the story of their life with all its human pain, suffering, angst, joys, victories and achievements or with a fellow empathetic human being, who is also an exquisite wordsmith?

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Humans Respond to Genuine Connection

What AI does often borders on plagiarism, because it does not think originally and simply discerns patterns from large amounts of written content created by others and hammers out some form of text that is neat, well organised, but completely lacking in soul. Human beings forge bonds on a primaeval and instinctive level. There is, perhaps, more chance of someone connecting with a dog or cat than with content created by a machine. When Brutus stabs Caesar in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the latter utters the immortal line, “Et tu Brute, then fall Casesa,” encapsulating a human being’s pain and anguish at the betrayal of someone very close to oneself. In this, you have an example of words touching you deeply. Would AI be able to showcase genuine human pain and pathos with so much heartfelt honesty?

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AI Can Be Unreliable

Unsupervised and unvetted AI-generated content often contains major errors and factual inaccuracies. It can’t always be relied upon to conform to the most ethical practices in terms of complying with copyright issues, as originality is not its strong suit. With so much riding on the content created on behalf of large organisations and institutions, it is best to work with a human professional of high repute, who will deliver exactly what is required.

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Backlash Against AI Content

There is already a  massive backlash against AI writing, with prospective clients explicitly stating their preference for human created content. In fact, many of them use tools to detect the use of AI. Consulting major Deloitte had to recently agree to refund the Australian government a portion of a $440000 consultancy fee after acknowledging that a report delivered by it which contained AI generated content had many serious errors in it.  A horror novel titled Shy Girl by US author Mia Ballard, which was scheduled for publication in the US in the month of April got cancelled on account of concerns that AI had been used to write it.

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Conclusion

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Nobody is denying the fact that AI is a great tool for writers to use and improve their craft. It can help them carry out research, bounce off ideas, help in editing and organising text, gathering information and fact checking. Using it as a wholesale content creator, though, is not a great idea and may lead to grief. As a matter of fact, there is as much chance of ghostwriting being replaced by AI as there is of commercial airlines sacking human pilots and moving en masse to pilotless aircraft. It is just not tenable.

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Did Macaulay unknowingly do us a favour by giving us English?

This image was generated using AI (ChatGPT, OpenAI) based on original content by the author.

Macaulay is a much reviled figure in India and with much justification for his decision to replace traditional Indian education with an English medium education that was Western in its ethos and orientation. His intention may have been to give rise to a class of Indians who were in his words “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, opinions, morals and intellect,”but what it achieved was giving the Indian people the opportunity to understand their oppressors better and ultimately oust them.

Merely teaching the highly intelligent Indians who had a long tradition of assimilating myriad cultural and linguistic influences into their fabric, in English was hardly going to subjugate their minds to the glory of the European races. However, the introduction of the language as a medium of instruction at a time when the star of Europe was on the ascendant, and the continent was leading the world in scientific discoveries acted as a catalyst for Indians to catch up with the West and reclaim their place in the world. It also helped them reevaluate and reconnect with their own past, thanks to the pioneering work of many Western Indologists like Max Mueller.

Besides, it allowed people in different parts of the vast Indian land mass who spoke different languages to receive education in a common language and thereby let them understand each other better. Till today a vast number of Indians from South India talk to their Northern compatriots in English. So the language in that sense helped foster national unity across the nation, from across the North, South, East and West of the country. As a matter fact English has become more than an official language used for education, office work, parliamentary debates and dissemination of news. Not only was the Indian constitution first written in it, the language is spoken across millions of bi-lingual homes in India. As a matter of fact India is home to its own Indian English with its unique peculiarities and eccentricities and is globally recognised as such.

It is not surprising that many of the leading lights of the Indian freedom movement like Dadabhai Naoroji, Gopal Krishan Gokhale, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, BR Ambedkar and many others received an English education, either in India or abroad in England. These were wise and erudite men who were aware of their own glorious heritage and proud of it, but welcomed whatever they could learn from Europe and the West. Far from fawning upon their colonial rulers and blindly following their diktats, they stood up to them and questioned their right to colonize and oppress the lands of others, which ultimately led to the freedom of the country.

The fact that millions of Indians continue to receive their education in English has helped them excel at home in India and countries across the world, rising to the highest possible positions in academics, business, politics and a range of other fields or disciplines. At the same time, the Indian languages have seen a revival and greater use in public life, allowing people to discover the richness of their own culture and civilisation that predates that of the West by millennia. 

Thomas Macaulay may have been a bigoted and ignorant colonialist who held that “a single shelf of a European library was worth the entire native literature of India and Arabia, “ but in insisting that Indians be taught in English, he not only opened a chink in the British armour by letting us know our enemies well enough to oust them, but he also helped India use the knowledge of the language to achieve an unassailable position on the world stage. Besides, Indians made the language their own using it in the way they felt it suited them best. Today, some of the most decorated and awarded writers in the English language are either Indian or of Indian origin. Macaulay would have never imagined in his wildest dreams that one day an English speaking Indian would become the Prime Minister of the UK. So much for unintended consequences.

Why do we desperately need sustainable marketing?

Illustration created with AI using OpenAI tools

 Past marketing endeavours that catered to the philosophy of consuming like one’s life depended on it has brought the world to a stage where ecological degradation caused by unchecked consumerism threatens the very survival of our planet. With our planet’s finite resources fast depleting and finishing before our very eyes, no longer is the high volume consumption template tenable. There is realization that infinite growth with finite resources is a fundamentally flawed concept, doomed to lead us to our destruction.

Business owners and marketers are now aware that producing and marketing without accounting for their impact on the natural resources available to us is something that can’t continue. It can no longer be business as usual, and one has to look at production and marketing with the lens of durability and recycling.

What exactly is Sustainable Marketing?

Sustainable marketing is not about promoting products and services that are deemed sustainable. At its core, it’s about accountability- the physical impact on the environment that any marketing activity entails and the necessity of providing truthful and accurate information about the products and services sought to be promoted.

Economic viability of the sustainable marketing process has to be ensured so that not only do businesses achieve stable long-term growth, but are also able to do so without diminishing the available resources. It is important that sustainable marketing break away from the imagery associated with marketing in the past. Unlike in the past, where the focus was on the product and extolling its features and attributes mattered the most, these days the focus has to shift to showing how a product or service has a stake in the environment, helps make society more equitable, while showing the path to long term sustainable growth.

Benefits of Sustainable Marketing

Sustainable marketing is not a fad that a business needs to indulge in to demonstrate its commitment to environmental causes.  On the contrary, it helps businesses accrue many real benefits. Let us look at what these are-

Helps cut costs

Sustainable marketing ensures that a company uses resources in a rational manner by reducing wastage and putting more efficient processes in place. All of this helps reduce costs and, thereby, save money.

Earning the trust and loyalty of customers

Awareness about climate change and the role of unsustainable business practices on the part of companies has made consumers, especially among the younger generations, prefer buying products from businesses known to be sensitive to such issues. Using sustainable marketing practices can help businesses earn brownie points with today’s customers and earn their loyalty.

Differentiate oneself from the competition

A company that uses sustainable marketing to help sell its products is able to present itself as the better alternative to the competition. Companies that are known to back environmentally friendly practices are able to project a wholesome brand image for their products, allowing themselves to differentiate and distinguish themselves from the competition.

Adopting Sustainable Marketing

Adopting sustainable marketing is the way for all businesses if they are serious about their businesses aligning with the way that the world is heading in this world that seeks to bring itself back from the brink of environmental disaster.

Environmental sustainability should be at the core of the marketing campaign

Your marketing campaign should convey the actual sustainability initiatives undertaken by your business, ranging from how you design and produce the products to the way you deliver them. Making claims that are not backed by what you have not actually implemented is to be scrupulously avoided.

Digital media is the way to go

The digital revolution is a great enabler of sustainable marketing, as one can leverage digital media channels for one’s marketing efforts. You don’t need to travel for events when these can be conducted virtually. However, where ever it is necessary to conduct these physically you can use recyclable and environment friendly materials.

Environment-friendly products and packaging

Talk about the sustainability attributes in the product or service you are offering. It may be a good idea to showcase the fact that the product in question is made from recyclable materials and that your packaging causes minimal damage to the environment. Let environment friendliness be the dominant messaging associated with your product or service.

Spending on sustainable causes

Putting your money where your mouth is is a great example of sustainable marketing. Donating a portion of your business’s profits to a sustainable cause demonstrates a strong commitment to the concept of working towards the greater good of the environment.

Marketing and sales have always had a bad press, and often for justifiable reasons. The fight against climate catastrophe is the ideal time to flip the script and make sustainable marketing a potent ally. That will work out well for everyone, consumers, business people and above all, the environment.

Supercharging consultancy in the age of AI

Illustration generated with AI assistance (OpenAI)

 The advent of AI and its deployment in the field of consultancy has many people believing that this industry and its professionals are at something of a crossroads. However, far from encouraging businesses to stop using the services of such professionals, AI actually helps them get better bang for their buck by combining technological abilities and human ingenuity and inventiveness to help them maximize productivity and truly fulfil their potential.

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The leading consultancies of the world are able to use generative AI as well as predictive artificial intelligence to allow their customers to strategically capitalise on strategic openings to transform their businesses and help them outperform themselves. They are able to help their clients get the most out of GenAI, allowing them to make paradigm redefining changes to important functions and come up with all-new business models.

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However, it is not just the large and established consultancy firms that stand to gain from AI. As a matter of fact, AI can help supercharge small firms and even solopreneurs, setting them up for incremental growth.

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Golden Age of Solopreneur Consultants

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While in the past, the consultancy business  was viewed as the sole preserve of the large legacy consultancy firms with exclusive access to the knowledge and experience that helped them become so valuable to their clients in the first place. The internet and AI have helped democratise access to such knowledge and experience, with more and more people being able to learn from the availability of a large number of case studies and well-trained language models, allowing them to become proficient business consultants. In fact, they will now be able to give the big firms a run for their money as they focus on value, rather than extended projects and fatter billing.

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In fact, lean and solopreneur management consultants can be better performers than legacy consultants, even when they don't have access to the resources commanded by the former.

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Don't become the type of consultant AI will replace

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There is a growing concern with some legitimate basis that AI will replace consultants. That fear may be largely misplaced unless one ensures that one does not become the type of consultant that AI will surely replace. Smaller AI firms can, in fact, learn to leverage AI effectively to deliver much more than a larger agency much faster, cheaper and better. That will only make such consultancies grow exponentially.

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Clients these days don't want to pay big money for generalist advice, but expect specialists and domain experts to give them more value than what they could obtain themselves by providing prompts to AI. For this, you need the right kind of expertise with regard to a business vertical, as well as the size of the companies you have experience working for. In other words, you know your stuff inside out. You can then position yourself as a niche consultant and own that space for yourself.

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You can make it work better because, unlike traditional consultants who rely on hordes of junior analysts and consultants to do the research, synthesise data and then present their deck to the client, you  rely on much leaner teams with specialised knowledge, allowing you to depute the right specialists in the vertical that your client is in. They will naturally be able to address the challenges and issues facing the company in an optimal manner.

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How AI can help supercharge consultancies

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Far from pushing consultancies on the path to oblivion, AI is, in fact, revolutionising the consultancy process by coming up with data-driven insight, as well  as enabling automation, in the process ensuring that the customers obtain bespoke services and experiences that speak to their concerns and requirements in the best possible manner.

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Because consultants can now obtain rapid access to highly structured data, they are able to make decisions considerably faster than before and thereby substantially reduce the project delivery time. Besides, the use of AI improves accuracy by its ability to flag biases and any possible copyright issues, thereby ensuring that the consultancies come up with stellar output and reduce the risks to a minimum.

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AI is a transformative technology which, if deployed in the right manner, can help supercharge business consultancies by enabling them to provide super value to their customers across industries.

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AI will not replace consultants

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One thing that can be predicted fairly confidently is the fact that there is as much likelihood of AI replacing consultants and consultancies altogether as there is of AI replacing presidents and prime ministers as rulers and administrators of a nation.

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While the  news about AI consultants being sacked or laid off by major AI consultancies (the Big 4) has sent shock waves in the industry, there is naturally a fair bit of anxiety and even dread about the future of consultants and consultancies. Tools like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot can easily step up to the plate and help perform in a matter of minutes what would take junior consultants weeks in the past.

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But when it comes to the strategic component of consulting, AI will come up short on its own. It cannot, for example, earn the trust of a client- the kind borne of a long-term, successful human-to-human relationship. No one will easily accept the advice of carrying out an elemental change in the direction of a business given by AI, whereas the same advice offered by a trusted human consultant will be received favourably. Besides, clients have no way of articulating their problems to AI, but can express these quite easily to someone they can communicate with, again,  at a human-to-human level. All organisations are run by human beings and are, therefore, essentially emotional in their instinct rather than logical like machines.

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For those who have watched the old TV sci-fi series Star Trek with the run-ins between the very deeply human Captain Kirk and  the ever logical and unemotional Mr Spock, it is pertinent to note who the captain of the ship is. Metaphorically, for clients, it is the human consultants who are the captains of their strategic destiny and not AI. The buck always has to and should stop with the humans, and for that reason, you will always need consultancies to help you negotiate the contingencies of business, and plan ahead for optimal success.

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Is Mediocre Better than Brilliant?

 

Image generated with OpenAI’s DALL·E based on the author’s prompt

Striving for excellence is something that we are given to understand will get us ahead in life. There are those who achieve it with consummate ease, and then there are those who struggle, plod, and somehow drag themselves to something approaching excellence. Yet, it is not always the former who necessarily get ahead in life. How often have we seen that those who were extraordinary in school lag far behind their, at that time, seemingly dull and unimpressive peers later in life?

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What explains this odd phenomenon? Is there some reason why some obviously brilliant and gifted people do so much more poorly than their not-so-well-endowed contemporaries? Perhaps, there is no mystery to this phenomenon, as brilliance is probably more of an aspirational quality that people worship and does neither exist in the real world. If at all it does, it exists as an artificial construct. In a scenario such as this, the average person goes about living life in a realistic and practical manner, allowing them to achieve far more than those trapped in trying to live up to the unrealistic expectations of a society that desires superheroes who are perfect at everything they do.

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The child prodigies who peak too early, trying to live up to the unrealistic hype their early successes generated, get caught in a lifestyle that requires them to appear smarter, brighter and more intelligent than their peers all the time. This lasts only as long as it can, for the peers not burdened with such self image and the expectation of others, go about learning real lessons about how to go about improving their prospects in life and with time, far surpass their sometime formidable super achieving peers.

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In school after school, there are incidences of trail-blazing students seeming to excel at everything they try their hand at, but coming up with below-average performances in high school or college. There are, for instance, the many examples of  those brilliant celebrity child actors expected to transition to super stardom as adults, who absolutely fail to make a mark when they grow up.

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What we have to understand is that as humans, we are all endowed with different strengths and suffer from our own specific types of weaknesses. Some take to reading naturally, while others have a facility for music. Then there are those who excel at athletics or sports. Some are charming and some dour. You cannot know for sure as to who achieves worldly success in the sweepstakes of life. A lot depends upon the circumstances of your birth, the kind of education you received, who your peers were growing up and how lucky you have been in life. One thing you can be sure of is that being perceived as brilliant or exceptionally gifted does not guarantee success. What can help you get there is how gritty you are in your efforts to enhance your skill sets and improve yourself.

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Average performers are the most prolific

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Interestingly, it seems that it is neither the low performers nor the high performers who are the most prolific.. Let us look at this bell curve, which puts the number of low performers in any group of people like golf players  at 20% , the highest performers also at 20% and the average performers at 60%.

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                                 Image generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E.

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In a sense, then, the world is a cohort of average people, and those who chase brilliance are destined not to do well in a system that is rigged in favour of the average people. The only way to stand out and be exceptional is to devote an extraordinary amount of time and energy to the pursuit of whatever you choose to excel at. This may make you so good at doing that thing that nobody is able to compete with you. But this often comes with great sacrifice and missing out on other important aspects of life like spending time with family and friends, travelling, or the pursuit of leisure. Most people try to strike a balance and therefore end up being average at what they choose to do in life, but likely live a happier and probably more fulfilling life.

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Those of the Baby Boomer and Gen X generations  who were brought up on a diet of striving for excellence and chasing achievement, no matter what the price, are appalled and nonplussed at the sight of seemingly directionless Gen Z youngsters prioritising personal happiness and comfort over the rewards that accrue from following the brutal corporate hamster wheel culture. Perhaps they are a spoiled generation afraid of biting the bullet and facing life squarely, or maybe they are smarter than the earlier generations in that they get it that the price of "progress" is not worth paying.

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In the old days of empires and slavery, the empire builders chased wealth and grandeur  on an epic scale and to achieve this, they built ruthless systems of exploitation of subjugated peoples, in the process ruining and impoverishing many old and thriving civilisations. The corporations of today are the empire builders of this age, and while they may not literally chain their employees to their desks, they do control their lives in a substantial manner. That has led to the latter becoming acutely aware of what their true priorities really are, especially in a scenario of growing uncertainty about employment opportunities against the backdrop of the growth of AI.

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The pandemic especially made many realise that the dream jobs with corner offices for which they incessantly trained and prepared for meant nothing when the chips were down. It was each person for themselves, and what they excelled at professionally would not account for that much. So people began to reassess their professional plans, and many adopted the flexible working model that allowed them to work from home and often set up their own independent consultancies. It was okay to be average in your desires and expectations, as long as that kept you happy.

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"Jack of All and Master of None" is a Good Thing

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Flipping conventional logic on its head, it is much better to be average  in a lot of things than be exceptional at something which AI would likely complete much faster without breaking into a sweat. If you are average at something, consider that as a good sign for excessive efficiency is for machines. We are not like the Greek gods and the Marvel Comics heroes and heroines who effortlessly carry the weight of the world upon our shoulders. We are humans with limited and finite abilities, which are best used at helping each other to lead a better life.

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Brilliance as a trait is not a dependable one. It may, from time to time, achieve a breakthrough or inspire others, but it will not deliver steady and constant output. Mediocrity, on the other hand, can be relied upon to deliver on a regular and consistent basis. With time, it achieves much. You can compare it with steadily and patiently investing in stocks of solid companies with proven credentials over a long period of time to build wealth, rather than bet everything on a single buzzing stock, hoping that it will make you an overnight billionaire. The real world rewards consistency over flashes of brilliance. This is as true of organizations and people as it is of our personal relationships.

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