AI is but a tool. The agency lies with us humans

The breathless chorus proclaiming that AI will do everything is becoming tiresome. It is also wrong. These narratives treat artificial intelligence not as a tool, but as a volition-driven agent of change. This is a category error, and it’s a dangerous one. It encourages passivity, waiting for the machines to decide. The future is not built by those who wait. It is built by those with agency. AI has no agency. It has no taste, no conviction, no soul. It cannot, in a fit of brilliance, decide your entire product strategy is wrong. It cannot wake up at 3am with a gnawing feeling that the user experience is simply not good enough. It does not understand the market, your customer, or your vision. It is an engine for generating outputs based on inputs, a mirror reflecting the data it was trained on. A very powerful mirror, to be sure, but a mirror nonetheless. The agency lies with us. It lies in the questions we ask, the constraints we set, and the judgement we apply to the output. In one of my ventures, we used an AI image generator to explore concepts for a new watch dial. It produced hundreds of technically perfect, aesthetically pleasing designs. None of them were right. They were generic, lacking a point of view. They were echoes of every other watch dial that has ever existed. The real work was not in the generation; it was in the selection, in the refinement, in the articulation of the single, specific idea we wanted to convey. The AI was a skilled intern, but we were the creative directors. The final design came from our tedious, human-led process of elimination and intuition. This isn't Luddism. To ignore a tool this powerful would be absurd. It is simply a call for clarity. AI is the most potent assistant we have ever had. It can write boilerplate code, saving my developers hours. It can draft marketing copy, which my team can then edit and imbue with our actual brand voice. It can analyse a spreadsheet of customer feedback and surface patterns. It accelerates the ‘how’. It does not, and cannot, determine the ‘what’ or the ‘why’. Those who believe AI will do everything have likely never had to ship a product. They have never had to stare at a blank page and conjure a strategy from conviction alone. They have never had to make a difficult decision based on incomplete information, guided only by their gut and their understanding of a customer’s unstated needs. This is the work. This is the part that cannot be automated. The value is not in the production of material; it is in the taste, the discernment, and the courage to make a choice and stand by it. The real danger of AI is not that it will rise up and take over, but that we will willingly abdicate our own agency to it. That we will become so enamoured with the sheer volume of its output that we forget our primary role is to have a point of view. The tool is powerful. But the hands that wield it, the mind that guides it, and the vision that directs it—that is where the work, and the opportunity, still lies. always lies. lies.