Is it just me, or has there been a vibe shift on AI this summer? With OpenAI and Anthropic preparing massive IPOs, the last few years of hype are giving way to some sobering realities. 

Instead of just daydreaming about new possibilities, it feels like we’re grappling more with the costs of AI—and not just the expense lines on the tech giants’ financial disclosures, but the impact of the technology on jobs, education, and the environment. 

Today, we hear from Kellogg’s Mohanbir Sawhney about the destructive potential of AI and what it will take to build a positive future from the wreckage. And we learn from Kellogg researchers how job seekers are already reframing their resumes to stand out from the bot crowd.

AI’s creative destruction

Sawhney, the McCormick Foundation Chair of Technology and a clinical professor of marketing at Kellogg, describes himself as an “AI optimist.” But on his Substack, The Hidden Weave, he also shares a bleak forecast for the near term: “AI is fast approaching its destructive peak.”

In addition to the existential threat to software companies and the enormous drain on power and water resources, Sawhney highlights the human cost of growing dependent on AI for intellectual and creative tasks. 

“Thinking is work, and AI excels at taking work away. Ask it to draft your argument, and you skip the labor of building the argument, which was where you would have found out what you actually thought,” Sawhney writes. “When machines write our sentences, steer our choices, and talk back in a voice we cannot tell from our own, they start to erode what makes us human.”

The scary part, Sawhney warns, is that these destructions happen passively, progressing through inertia and drift. Shaping a better future with AI, on the other hand, will require active intervention from people, companies, and society. 

For leaders, Sawhney advises “building above the model”—focusing on what generalized AI doesn’t have, such as proprietary data, domain knowledge, and workflows built on years of experience with customers. He also advises companies to emphasize retraining over layoffs, preserving employees’ trust and loyalty through new roles that leverage their expertise.

“The dangers are real, but the response is in our hands,” Sawhney concludes. “As humans, we have the gift of free will. Let us use it to build the world worth living in, and let us build it with intent and effort.”

Read more at The Hidden Weave.

Betting on creativity

Many of those workers see the writing on the wall: automation is going to replace many of the basic technical skills that used to be critical for jobs. Kellogg researchers Maryam Kouchaki and Adam Waytz, with former Kellogg postdoc Monica Gamez-Djokic, wanted to see how that awareness changes people’s approach to the job market.

A study found that most people believe automation will increase the importance of tasks that require creative skills. And in an experiment where participants were asked to highlight a selection of skills in an application cover letter, participants who first read about the threat of automation prioritized creative skills over technical skills.

“Creativity is really that sweet spot,” Kouchaki says. “People feel it will be useful in a world of automation and AI and also that it is less replaceable by these technologies.”

This belief also translated into increased interest in creative education over learning technical skills and a preference for employers who emphasize a creative culture over an analytical one, further studies showed. That’s useful information for schools and companies seeking to attract students and talent in the new AI era. 

“When people are anxious about the future of their jobs, they will gravitate toward environments that offer the opportunity to perform work that feels distinctively human and therefore less replaceable by machines,” Waytz says. “A company that values creativity signals that experience.” 

Read more in Kellogg Insight.