Skills you Should not Outsource to AI

Aspiration

Would you let AI take a shot at setting goals or objectives for your company? And how would you define what winning really means and why it matters. People need to aspire to other people. This is the job of the leadership in the company to set goals, expectations, objectives and how you know it's working.

Everybody who comes to a job every day needs to be inspired by a common understanding of where the company is going. By far we are not there that AI can do that if in the future they will ever be able to.

Judgement

Do you let AI make the final decision on what looks good or bad? In the company processes you have defined how decisions are being made and who's responsible. Somebody is responsible for making the decision which trade-offs you're making and how to codify them. An AI system doesn't know what's right or wrong for a business. So they make the wrong decision all the time.

Judgment or a decision that lives only in one person's head doesn't scale and disappears when they leave. Valuable knowledge walking out of the door. You have to make judgment and decision part of the process in the standard operating procedures of the company, not let AI decide based on the probability score of the newest model of the day.

Creativity

An AI system calculates the most probable next token in line based on how it is being trained. This training has a number of guidelines and guardwills that determine how it would make the statistical decision what comes next after the previous token. Therefore, it cannot be predicted to reframe the problem. It can all only predict what's the next likely step or token.

How can an AI come up with something new, come up with ideas that have never been thought of before. The AI is a probability model based on what has been fed into the model, not something new.

Origin and Inspiration

Earlier this year I heard global managing partner for McKinsey Company, Bob Sternfels, on the All Inn Podcast talking about their view of AI. He talked about the fact that within McKinsey they looked at different jobs and which ones were very hard to take over with the AI. Not so much the jobs were mentioned, more the scope of a job, what needs to be done by humans. He mentioned three particular skill sets of scopes that at that moment they thought that AI could not really do the job as people can.

Instantly my interest was triggered as I worked with my clients to identify where we can see the impact of AI implementation and how we would organize our teams around the skill set where people would need to be present. Being able to articulate skill sets or scope for a certain role would take a lot of the anxiety of people losing their jobs away and showing them a path for development of a full-time career where AI plays a significant role in their job but not is taking over their responsibilities. AI makes a lot of execution cheaper but still requires a decision that needs to be made by a person. From the podcast: "AI can optimize. It can't choose a direction worth optimizing toward."

I give the credit to identify these three skill sets to McKinsey. Well I took it further to build a framework around how to apply it in the companies I work with.

• On the All In podcast in Las Vegas, Bob Sternfels called out aspiration, judgment and creativity as the three skills you need to have humans in the loop. This was at CES 6th of January 2026. If you listen to the podcast you will hear Bob talk about
  • Aspiration, how you choose your goal and give examples of low Earth orbit, the Moon or Mars.
  • Judgement, He calls out that there is no right and wrong in these models. Humans have to decide on decisions. Your judgment needs to be based on values and societal norms. A I cannot decide for you there.
  • Creativity, The AI models of today produce the most likely next step.Inference models. True creativity lets you rethink the problem and find a different way to solve it.

AJC - Why does the order matter?

Without any Aspiration, there's no judgement towards an objective or goal. Decisions are not pushed into the organization and creativity doesn't have a direction.

Without Judgement, How would you know where to go? You're w running into a direction where you don't know if it's the right one.

Without Creativity, Good decisions might be made one time but nothing repeats itself. What do we have to talk about if there's no creativity in the world?

Test it out in your own situation

You can test it out in a small brain exercise. It works as a test.Not a description.

A: Do we know where we're going? Does this product feature we're shipping or campaign bring us closer to the goal?

J: Did we make the right trade-offs? Who's the final approver and do they understand what they judged?

C: Did we try to look at the problem in a different way to solve it? Is this campaign really new or have we seen it before?

You quickly will see if/where you need humans in the loop. Stop and think, or get into contact when you want to work together!