It’s clear to me that through the blinding blizzard of artificial intelligence (AI) hysteria, political turbulence and economic shakiness, one thing will separate winners from losers: who is better at building human connections.
In the short term, real and exaggerated AI platforms and campaigns will help marketers and data hacks win at pitches, reduce cost for creative work and accelerate processes. These are all good things. None of them, however, is a strategy of winning customers and keeping them for the long term.
The reality is simple: we can all search for strategies and recommendations on DeepSeek, Gemini and ChatGPT.
Our creative colleagues will use Midjourney and Sora for their work and our tech colleagues will leverage Claude to power ahead. These fantastic AI tools will make the mundane obsolete, democratise the average and automate the lower third of the value chain. But just as professional sport championships are now won or lost at the small margins of advantage based on experience, judgement, wisdom, grit and determination, the same will be true in the world of business.
Wisdom as the differentiator
Everyone will be able to do the basics. Anyone will be able to call up a decent strategy recommended by AI. Many will generate creative work out of the cloud and even more so, will tap into dynamic data sets for knowledge, whose accessibility was unthinkable just a few years ago.
Here’s what may not be available to all: the motivation to want to be the best and the grit to fight for it, through the best and worst of times.
Similarly, the judgement to sit on a mountain of choices and options, but to take the path which leads to success, is a talent very few will have. Finally, not a single AI platform, process or system will empower you with the wisdom to do the right thing while being driven, ethical, excellent and generous at the same time.
Wisdom does not come from reading or generating anything from technology; it is the result of countless human experiences which include deep scars from pain and conflict, and resilience fostered from countless struggles. It also comes from the humility born of failure, and generosity grown from knowing nothing is good if it’s not shared.
‘‘Here’s what may not be available to all: the motivation to want to be the best and the grit to fight for it, through the best and worst of times.’’
Most of all, this wisdom comes from the enlightenment of knowing that we are on this earth to love and be loved, not to write prompts and live off synthetic slop. So, as we head into 2026 with an eye to winning more business and retaining that which we have, we will want to ensure our teams are technically ready to master everything from prompt engineering and generative engine optimisation (GEO) strategies to working creatively and building their proprietary language models and custom apps, which bring impact and value to
their AI stack.
Organisational change
This fusion of technical and creative work will need to spread across every element of our businesses: from human resources (HR) and finance to marketing and product development. It cannot be the domain of IT or a single ‘AI department’ – it must be with every one of us, all the time and on all projects, no matter how small they may seem. This process will not be easy as most AI is still dumb when left to its own devices or managed without expertise.
It’s also not easy to create company-wide strategies which educate, inform and empower hundreds, if not thousands of people, in a relatively short period of time. Let’s remind ourselves to move fast, but to be patient, accept failure and to invest in experimentation and customisation until our AI starts to really work for us at the scale we all know is possible. It’s equally important to fight hard to not have team members fall behind. When the lower third of our value chain is automated, there is an inevitability that some jobs will go, but that doesn’t mean the people have to go.
The automation of that lower third of the value chain is growing the upper two-thirds of the value chain with new roles, ideas and responsibilities which more people can work in. Let’s do all we can to move people up that value chain and minimise job losses by being determined to do good for all those in our teams. Mastering AI will be a key technical and creative effort. Mastering our humanity will be an even greater, and far more rewarding, challenge.
The CEOs and HR leaders of today have their work cut out for them: not only do they have to train entire teams to master a new technology quickly, but they must also relentlessly remind everyone that business is not a raid on people’s wallets, but rather, it’s a purpose, focused on doing good in the world and helping people realise their dreams.
The corporate world has never done well at that calling. AI is going to change that: you are either going to end up running robots to do shallow work, or you will outrun the robots because your purpose for those you serve will always keep you at a higher level of success that no machine or human competitor ever will reach.
By Mazen Nahawi, Group CEO, CARMA.
