“We’ve been dehumanising people to follow a process, a script, a standard.”

I said that about the technology careers Surinder Lall and I have both had. Surinder agreed before I had finished the sentence. Then I added the part that is harder to sit with: AI is just the accelerator.

If you have led a transformation in the last twenty years, you have probably relied on a script like that. I know I did.

The first migration

Work moved from the back office into the call centre, and to make that move safe we created standard scripts. There was one for handling insurance quotes and one for claims notification. The reason was sound: consistency and compliance. Every customer heard the right words in the right order, whoever picked up the phone.

Then the scripts did something nobody had written into the plan. They made the work portable.

Once the work fitted a script, it could move.

Over fifteen years ago I was leading the transformation of that operating model to outsourced offshore centres. The scripts went with the calls. If you think about it, that was generation 1.0 of migrating an operating model. Now we are in a new generation of operating models, I’ve lost count of which one so I am calling it generation ++++, and the conversation is about migrating to AI agents.

The case for the script

To be fair to the leaders who made those calls, and I was one of them, the scripts worked. A customer reporting a claim got a consistent, compliant answer. The business got an operation it could predict and control. Boards approve business cases for a reason, and every generation of leaders is asked to make the operation run more efficiently than the last.

Surinder put the harder version of that argument plainly. Offer most businesses a choice that makes them more money, he said, and very few will turn it down. In his view, the way AI is now being used to justify cuts has shown us the face of capitalism, and we were naive to believe it was ever about anything other than profit. My point is that the face has been there all along. We were busy writing the operating model around it.

Where the case breaks

The case holds on everything the business case measured. It breaks on what it never asked.

Nobody asked what it means to someone to stop using their judgement and start reading lines. Nobody asked what happened to the people whose work had been written down well enough to move. We had project plans. We had a business case. We had a programme team with a reputation to protect. What we didn’t have was an honest account of the human side of what we were doing.

That was generation 1.0. Generation ++++ follows the same logic, only faster. An agent doesn’t need the work to move offshore. It needs the work written down.

Once the work fitted a script, it could vanish.

The question the script never asked

Surinder has a way of naming what this feels like from the inside. He says the two most impactful words in how people define themselves are “I am”, followed by a name and a job title. Then a technology arrives that can reproduce much of what you know in a prompt.

“So who are you now?”

He talks about the grief that follows when AI is introduced, and he thinks “people don’t realise just how profound that grief is”. Someone who says “I worked twenty years to build this knowledge” is watching their definition of themselves being written down and handed to something else.

I recognise that, because a script does the same thing more slowly. It takes the knowledge someone carried and turns it into lines anyone can read. We told ourselves we were protecting the customer. Often we were. We were also teaching people that what they knew mattered less than what the script said.

As I put it to Surinder, we have all benefited from the corporate machine. “We’ve sort of lost ourselves in that process.”

Why you can’t sit this one out

Surinder describes today’s leaders as “the most consequential generation of leaders for this technology”. He doesn’t mean that as a compliment. He means the direction AI takes in organisations is being set now, by the people in the room now. Doing nothing still sets a direction.

“you cannot choose not to participate,” he told me. “Our job as responsible leaders of this period is to help shape the direction of what we want our children to inherit.”

He went further, and this is the line I keep coming back to. If we stay passive, “future generations will look at us and blame us for our inaction.”

I recognise that from the other side. I have been in the room where the operating model was redrawn. I know how easy it is to believe the plan is the transformation, when the transformation is what people live through afterwards.

What we owe the people behind us

Leaders owe it to everyone following in their footsteps to have considered the human and honest side of the transformation. That means more than the project plans, the business case and the reputation of the programme team.

Surinder worries most about who those people will be. The roles being cut first are the junior ones: entry level lawyers, researchers, the people who would once have learned the work by doing it beside someone more experienced. “That circle of continuous learning and handing to the next generation is being broken everywhere,” he said. His question is simple and uncomfortable: if we’re not hiring junior people anymore, who is the next generation’s leader?

Generation 1.0 moved the work and kept most of the people somewhere in the chain. Generation ++++ can remove the step where people learn. And as Surinder put it, borrowing a saying someone once gave him, “nothing taught by force stays in the soul.” A workforce that meets AI for the first time as something done to it will resist it, and who could blame them.

Generation 1.0 gave us a rehearsal. We saw what happens when work is standardised for consistency and the people doing it are treated as part of the standard. Generation ++++ is not a new kind of decision. It is the same decision, made at a scale and speed that leaves much less room to correct it later.

Over fifteen years ago the script was written for people to follow. This time it is being written for agents. When the people following in our footsteps read it, will they find any sign that we considered them?

Whatever next?

You can hear the full conversation with Surinder on Whatever Next? Unplugged.