Who Wins in the AI Era? My Money's on the Ones Who Listen.

I once watched a respected leader do exactly what a restructure asks of people. During the consultation period, through the proper channel, they raised major issues with the proposed structure. Real issues. The expensive kind, that cost money and people later.

Their concerns weren't explored. They were described as struggling with change. As lacking resilience. When the new structure landed, their role wasn't in it.

Resilience, it turns out, meant agreeing.

Everyone else in that organisation learned the lesson on the spot: speak up and you're next. Now imagine that organisation rolls out an AI tool to analyse staff sentiment. It will find a workforce that has learned to say nothing useful, in very positive language.

That story is the whole AI conversation in miniature.

The prediction

Here's who I think wins in business over the next five years. The organisations that invest in engagement. Customer engagement. Employee engagement. Community engagement. And pair it with AI, on purpose.

Everyone else will spend a lot of money automating their absurdity.

I love AI. I use it every day, and Becky has written about why she calls it Extra Intelligence. But I've spent 25 years inside organisations, as the business lead and as the HR lead, and I've run more tick-box engagement than I'd like to admit. Here's what I've learned.

Engagement, the tick-box edition

Up until now, most engagement has been performative. It happens because a policy, an award or a piece of legislation says it must. Then it gets filed.

Restructures. I've run them as the business lead and as the HR lead. The compulsory consultation period goes like this. The structure is signed off. The org chart is drafted. Then we consult. We log the feedback, thank everyone for it, and implement the structure we drafted. The leader in my story made one mistake: they thought the consultation was real.

Community engagement. I've run it as a business lead, and these days I innovate and deliver it with Becky, who has decades in the field. You know the format. A survey on the website. A drop-in session at 2pm on a Tuesday, when the people you most need to hear from are at work or on the school run. The report proudly counts the responses. Ask what changed because of them. Crickets. Nothing changed, but hey, we were compliant.

Voice of the customer. Here's how most programs work. A survey goes to customers who finished a transaction. They score you. The score feeds the dashboard, and everyone's thrilled when it goes up. But it only ever hears from the people who made it to the end. The customer who gave up on the portal, couldn't get through on the phone, or never tried isn't in the sample. So voice of the customer confirms what the dashboard already believes, and never sees who it left out. As I wrote in Your data is clean. Your system is absurd., the data is accurate. It only measures the people your system already works for.

Now add AI. Cue the bot dance.

AI can read ten thousand survey comments before you've finished your coffee. It can find the pattern your dashboard hides. That's a gift. So what are most organisations doing with it? Putting it between themselves and the people they exist to serve.

You know the bot dance. You ask the chatbot a question. It offers three options, none of which are your problem. You type "speak to a human". It sends you the FAQ. The FAQ sends you to the portal. The portal tells you to call. The phone line, after forty minutes of hold music, tells you to use the portal. Congratulations, you've completed the full routine. Nothing has moved, and the containment rate looks fantastic.

AI doesn't know the absurdity is absurd. It thinks it's the process. Feed it tick-box engagement and it will tick the box faster.

AI on its own: blerg. Engagement on its own: blerg.

Engagement without AI has its own problem. It's slow, manual and hard to scale. Teams cover a wall in sticky notes, then drown in them. By the time the report is written, the moment has gone, and the people who gave their time have stopped turning up. Can you blame them?

So picture four kinds of organisation:

• Neither. Tick-box engagement, no AI. Slow, stuck, and still formatting the consultation summary.
• AI only. Faster, cheaper, more absurd. Customers leave, staff leave, and the dashboard says satisfaction is stable.
• Engagement only. Big hearts, sticky notes everywhere, findings that land six months too late.
• Both. AI handles the volume, the patterns and the routine. People do the finding, the believing and the changing. My money's here.

This is the thinking behind EVA, the method Becky and I use. Engage with the people you exist to serve and find out what they're really experiencing. Validate them by believing the human experience they are having. Adapt the policy, process, culture or point of view that needs to change, then measure the benefit.

AI can speed up every step. It can't do the believing for you. That bit's on you.

Three skills you won't find on a vendor's feature list

As AI takes on more of the work, three human skills become the scarce ones.

1. Go and find them

Listening starts earlier than most people think. It starts with believing there is a group you haven't heard from, even though you don't know who they are yet. The customer who gave up halfway through the portal. The carer who can't make the 2pm drop-in. The ones you're burning out with the absurd.

They won't come to you. Listening comes from putting your sneakers on and going to find them. That's exactly what Becky did, as she tells in For the Love of Community Engagement. She walked the streets and found the Irish smokers she needed to hear from at church, in bingo halls and at the supermarket. No survey link required.

2. Believe them

This is the hard one, because of the Invisible Checklist™, which I unpack in my book Start With Yes, coming early 2027. When we listen to the people we exist to serve, we inadvertently take them through it. Our policy. Our process. Our beliefs. The protections we've built for ourselves. Every item on it is a reason we don't have to act on what we're hearing.

Did they use the right channel? Do they have the paperwork? Is this a one-off? By the time someone has cleared the checklist, we've talked ourselves out of hearing them, and they've spent their energy trying to be believed.

The winners will listen with the intent to believe. That's the V in EVA. Validate the people you exist to serve by believing the human experience they are having. Then you can do something about it.

3. Make it safe to speak up

Remember the leader at the start? None of this works if telling the truth gets you structured out. In too many workplaces, raising a concern earns you a label. Negative. Resistant to change. Or my personal favourite: lacking resilience.

When that happens, people stop speaking. You lose your early warning system, and no amount of AI can rebuild it. The sentiment tool will tell you everything is fine, right up until it isn't.

Who wins

In five years, everyone will have the same AI tools. The gap between organisations will come from what they were willing to hear.

The winners will use AI to listen at scale, and build leaders and cultures that believe what they hear and act on it. Their customers will feel it. Their staff will stay. Their communities will trust them.

The rest will have very efficient bots, very tidy dashboards, and a lot of people who have stopped telling them anything. They'll probably buy another tool to find out why.

You don't need a transformation program to start. Ask three questions on Monday:

1. Who haven't we heard from, and where would we find them?
2. What's on our Invisible Checklist™?
3. What happened to the last person who told us something we didn't want to hear?

Can't answer the first one? That's where we come in. Start a conversation with Becky and me, and we'll help you find the people you haven't heard from yet, believe what they tell you, and fix what's in the way.