The quiet gift of artificial intelligence is time. The question is how we use it.
I can still remember the pressure on the keys, the strike of each letter onto paper — an Olivetti Lettera 32, in the late 1980s. On it, I wrote my undergraduate thesis, retyping entire pages for a single correction. That same year, I got my hands on my first IBM personal computer. Ecstasy is the only word that comes back to me. A black screen, a green cursor blinking. It was the first transition I lived through up close. Many followed.
Spreadsheets replaced the familiar pocket calculators and spared us hours of arithmetic. Then Windows. Then the internet. And finally, the social platforms that changed how we speak to one another. Each time, the same enthusiasm, the same anxiety, the same conversations about the future of the professions.
Look more closely, and the pattern is the same in every case: the professions that endured were the ones that adapted and placed greater value on human relationships.
Consider bookstores. When Amazon launched, conventional wisdom held that small, independent bookshops were finished. The opposite happened. Since 2020, their number in the United States has grown by 70%. How did they manage it? They stopped competing with Amazon on volume and price. They became meeting places for people with shared interests, with personally curated collections, with owners who know their customers and recommend books that no algorithm would suggest. They became more human-centred. And they flourished.
So, at this stage of my career, I watch the rise of artificial intelligence with more enthusiasm than worry. The numbers are, in fact, staggering. A simple search online shows that in 2025, the largest AI companies spent roughly 400 billion dollars on infrastructure — close to what Google invested over the 27 years of its existence. The result of that investment now sits in every smartphone, available at negligible cost, performing research and analysis in seconds that once kept teams of professionals occupied for weeks.
The exponential pace of artificial intelligence troubles us, and rightly so. But is it only a threat, or also an opportunity for a better model of professional growth?
I have always believed that every professional activity and every business venture — from the sole practitioner to the corporate group — ultimately rests on relationships. Documents and analyses are only the raw material. At every meaningful moment — an agreement, a partnership, a decision — what makes the difference is always the people themselves. The data is the visible part of the work. The relationship is the real one. And trust, the thing that holds all of it together, grows only out of relationships that are genuine.
Now consider how the last two decades of digitisation have shaped human contact. Meetings have moved onto screens. Conversations have been compressed into messages. Attention is splintered among notifications. Presence — the simple act of sitting across from another person with nothing else competing for your attention — is becoming one of the rarest experiences in professional life. And rare things, by an old and reliable law, grow in value.
This is the opportunity hidden inside the artificial intelligence revolution. For the first time in a generation, professionals and executives are getting time back. The time they can devote to an activity that remains beyond the reach of technology: being genuinely present with another human being.
In practice, what this requires turns out to be ordinary. It is about finding the time to know your client and your colleague as people. Showing real interest in their life. Listening to what they say, rather than rehearsing what you will say next. Caring, with the gain set aside. These are described as soft skills. In my experience, they are the hardest work in the profession, and the work that builds the strongest firms. The kind of trust they produce accumulates in small, quiet acts over the years. The Sunday phone call. The honest piece of advice that cost you the listing. The client referred to another firm because that firm could serve them better. Such acts stay outside the quarterly report.
The meeting, the meal, the conversation that travels beyond the boundaries of the transaction — these are slowly becoming the high-value product, precisely because everything around them has been automated.
All of this we know. And yet, in every previous transition, we have forgotten it.
I have lived through many technological changes. Each one promised us time, and each one delivered it. The part we handled poorly, every time, was how we used that time: instead of devoting it to people, we drew further away from them.
When the pocket calculator gave way to the spreadsheet, we stayed at our desks for more calculations rather than leaving earlier. When email replaced the fax, it kept us in front of our laptops longer still. When the mobile phone put communication in the palm of our hand, we stopped speaking to one another.
Artificial intelligence will give us, perhaps, more time than we have ever had. This time, will we use it better?
