Stop Training Your Team to Beat the Machines

AI will win the processing race. Your job is to know when the output is wrong.

Anthropic’s CEO Just Told Us What Skills Actually Matter Now

TL;DR: Dario Amodei published a 19,000-word warning about AI arriving faster than most people expect. The scary parts will get the headlines. But buried in his argument is something every senior leader needs to hear: the skills we’ve undervalued for decades are about to become the only ones that matter.

The Essay You Probably Won’t Read

Today, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, published an essay called “The Adolescence of Technology.” It runs about 19,000 words. You’re not going to read it. Neither are most of your partners or your board.

But you should know what it says.

Here’s the short version: Amodei says there’s a decent chance powerful AI arrives in one to two years, and he argues it may be only a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything. Not some tasks. Not most tasks. Everything. He calls it a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.” Fifty million minds, each smarter than any Nobel Prize winner, operating hundreds of times faster than humans, with a 10x decision-tempo advantage.

He’s not some guy on Twitter. He runs one of the three companies actually building this technology. He’s seen the internal benchmarks. And he’s telling us the clock is ticking.

What the Headlines Will Miss

Most coverage of this essay will focus on the scary stuff. Bioweapons. Totalitarian surveillance. Job losses in the millions. Those risks are real, and Amodei spends thousands of words on each of them.

But there’s something else in the essay that matters more for anyone running a firm right now.

Here’s my operator translation of what his essay implies for firms.

AI is getting shockingly good at the middle of cognitive work. The drafting. The analysis. The “here are the relevant data points organized in a table.” It can already do those things faster and cheaper than your junior staff.

But AI is still bad at the edges.

The beginning, where you have to figure out what question you’re actually trying to answer. The end, where you have to decide if the output is right, what’s missing, and what to do about it. The parts that require reading a room, building trust, or making a call when the data doesn’t give you a clean answer.

That’s judgment. That’s emotional intelligence. That’s knowing good from bad.

And here’s the uncomfortable part: those are the skills we’ve systematically undervalued for decades because they don’t fit neatly on a resume or a performance review.

The Question You Need to Ask Yourself

If judgment, EQ, and verification are the last moat, then every senior leader needs to ask a hard question.

How much of your day is spent on things AI will do better than you within two years?

And how much is spent on the things that will still require a human?

Be honest. Think about yesterday. The emails you wrote. The documents you reviewed. The analysis you requested. The meetings you sat through.

How much of that was truly about judgment, relationships, and decisions in ambiguous situations? And how much was just... processing?

Most of us won’t like the answer.

This Isn’t About Job Titles

I’m not worried about whether we’ll still have partners or managing directors or COOs. Titles will survive. They always do.

I’m worried about what those titles will mean.

If AI handles the cognitive middle of most professional work, then the value of a senior leader shifts entirely to the edges. You become valuable for the questions you ask, not the answers you produce. For the bad outputs you catch, not the good outputs you generate. For the trust you build with clients and colleagues, not the hours you bill.

That’s a different job than the one most of us trained for.

The Apprenticeship Problem Gets Worse

I wrote recently about how AI is breaking the apprenticeship model that trained every white-collar professional. The grunt work wasn’t just labor. It was stealth training. And if AI absorbs that work, we lose the training along with it.

Amodei’s essay makes this problem even more urgent.

If we’re only a few years from AI that matches senior-level cognition, then the window for developing human judgment the old way is closing fast. The associates and analysts coming up now may be the last generation who learn by doing the repetitive work that builds pattern recognition over time.

So what happens in ten years when you need to replace yourself?

If the juniors never developed judgment because the apprenticeship ladder collapsed, you don’t have a bench. You have a gap. And AI won’t fill it, because the whole point is that AI is bad at exactly the things you need your successor to be good at.

This is a succession crisis hiding inside an AI adoption story.

What Actually Becomes Valuable

Amodei doesn’t say this explicitly, but it’s the logical conclusion of his argument.

The skills that will matter most are the ones that feel least like “skills” in the traditional sense. Reading people. Knowing when something feels off even if you can’t articulate why. Building relationships where clients trust your judgment, not just your output. Making decisions when the data is incomplete and the stakes are high. Taking accountability for outcomes, not just processes.

These aren’t things you learn in an MBA program. They’re not things you can hire for by scanning resumes. And they’re definitely not things AI is going to master anytime soon.

The irony is that we’ve spent decades building professional cultures that optimize for the opposite. Credentials over instincts. Process over judgment. Measurable outputs over the hard-to-quantify stuff that actually drives outcomes.

That’s about to flip.

What This Means for Your Firm

If Amodei is even half right, then the firms that survive the next decade won’t be the ones that adopt AI fastest. They’ll be the ones that figure out what humans are still for.

That means changing how you hire. Stop screening for pedigree and pattern-matching on credentials. Start figuring out how to identify judgment, curiosity, and the ability to spot when something’s wrong. Those are hard to test for. But they’re about to become the only things worth testing for.

It means changing how you develop people. If the apprenticeship ladder is broken, you need to build judgment intentionally. Real stakes earlier. Faster feedback loops. Exposure to ambiguity instead of protection from it.

And it means changing yourself. The senior leaders who thrive will be the ones who lean into the human stuff. The relationship building. The difficult conversations. The decisions that require courage, not just analysis.

The ones who try to out-compute the machines will lose. The machines are better at computing.

The Conversation I Keep Having

I’ve got three kids navigating this transition. A senior in college, a junior, and a high schooler watching it all unfold. The advice I give them is the same advice I’d give any managing partner.

The game has changed. The skills that got you here won’t keep you here. But the skills that will keep you here, the judgment, the EQ, knowing good output from bad, those are learnable. You can develop them. You can build a firm that values them.

But only if you’re willing to admit you need to learn them in the first place.

Amodei ends his essay by saying humanity has the strength to pass this test. I think he’s right. But it starts with seeing the test clearly.

The question isn’t whether AI will transform your business. That’s already decided.

The question is whether you’ll still be valuable when it does.

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Why I write these articles:

I write these pieces because senior leaders don’t need another AI tool ranking. They need someone who can look at how work actually moves through their organization and say: here’s where AI belongs, here’s where your team and current tools should still lead, and here’s how to keep all of it safe and compliant.

In this article, we looked at what happens when AI absorbs the cognitive middle of professional work—and why the skills we’ve systematically undervalued are about to become the only ones that matter. The market is noisy, but the path forward is usually simpler than the hype suggests.

If you want help sorting this out:

Reply to this or email me at steve@intelligencebyintent.com. Tell me what’s slowing your team down and where work is getting stuck. I’ll tell you what I’d test first, whether your current talent development model needs rethinking, and whether it makes sense for us to go further than that first conversation.

Not ready to talk yet?

Subscribe to my daily newsletter at smithstephen.com. I publish short, practical takes on AI for business leaders who need signal, not noise.