View RALI news and insights to keep up to date with the latest on trend developments relating to future leadership capability and experience requirements and the future world of work.
About 35% of current jobs in the UK are at high risk of computerisation over the following 20 years, according to a study by researchers at Oxford University and Deloitte. Go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-34066941 and type your job title into the search box below to find out the likelihood that it could be automated within the …
At an Amazon warehouse in Northeast Ohio, Laura works the night shift, operating an order picker that puts her 40 feet in the air.
“I’m a treasure hunter,” she says. “I use a forklift to go find stuff.”
The warehouse has not yet adopted …
Right now, I have (checks computer) more than a dozen scheduled tasks that AI handles for me. Plus, countless other saved instructions to run repeatable processes on the fly.
Most AI advice focuses on content generation or chatbot conversations. But what a large company needs and what an individual consumer might do with artificial intelligence are vastly different from the needs of a solopreneur: one person, with some business use cases.
Solopreneurs can get a lot of benefit from handing off specific operational tasks. This type of work keeps your business running smoothly, but it isn’t the best use of your time.
Sorting and organizing your information
Solopreneurs accumulate data across tools—like spreadsheets, client files, and project notes. Keeping everything organized requires a little bit of judgment (“this file goes in this folder”), but the work isn’t complex enough to need your attention. That’s why it’s a good task for AI.
For example, I keep track of my client work and online writing in a giant database. Each article has a few categories added, so I can find it again. Previously, it was a manual task for me to select a few categories based on the topic. Now, AI can make the selection for me from a predefined list. Is it perfect? No. But it’s about 90% correct, and that’s good enough for this task, especially since I don’t have to think about it anymore.
AI can also organize emails in your inbox or files on your computer. I’ve had AI rename hundreds of files across my Google Drive, so they’re consistent. Was it absolutely necessary? No. Did it make my life better? Absolutely.
Repurposing what you’ve already created
Most solopreneurs create content in one format and leave it there. AI can take what you’ve written and adapt it for different platforms, so you get more mileage out of it.
To be clear: This isn’t AI generating content from scratch. Lots of AI advice tells people to do this, and that’s how “AI slop” is created. In this case, AI is reformatting your existing ideas. A blog post becomes social media posts. A newsletter becomes posts for a different platform. These are still your core ideas, but AI handles the translation to different formats.
When I publish a blog post, AI creates drafts of the social media posts for me, based on a lengthy set of instructions and examples of my voice and tone. I always edit before publishing, but it’s a lot easier to edit something existing than stare at a blank screen.
Accountability and check-ins
One of the hardest parts of solopreneurship is not having anyone to keep you on track. There’s no manager checking on your upcoming tasks and goals. It’s easy to let weeks pass without reviewing whether you’re making progress.
AI can run structured check-ins, like weekly, monthly, or quarterly. The check-in process reviews what you accomplished, what fell through the cracks, and what you should prioritize next.
During my weekly check-in, AI follows the exact same structure. Last week’s check-in is written to a single document, so AI can reference the document as memory. I get prompts like, “You said you would work on XYZ last week. What got done, and what is still outstanding?”
When I see a list of what I said I’d get done versus what I actually got done, I can ask myself: Why did that happen? I type my responses, and it gets logged for the following week’s session. The ongoing list keeps me on track.
Research and summarizing
AI is really good for tasks like research, brainstorming, or summarizing a long document. AI isn’t replacing your thinking, but it gives you a starting point.
Recently, I was considering a new AI notetaker app for meetings. I gave AI a list of the features that are important to me and told it to research my options. I got a list of results and recommendations. I still had to verify that the information was correct, but it was much faster and more personalized than digging through Google search results.
Tip: Always ask your AI tool to summarize the conversation into a document that you can save elsewhere. I saved my AI notetaker research as a Google Doc. That way, I could come back to it later, rather than digging through my chat conversations.
Choose the AI tool that works for you
The specific tool—like Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini—doesn’t matter. Any of them should be able to handle the tasks I’ve described here. You can save your instructions or use features like Projects, Skills, or Gems, depending on the tool.
It’s more important that you provide specific context about who you are, your business, and your content. Without it, you’ll get generic output, which won’t end up saving you any time.
Companies have spent the past few years making louder commitments to neurodiverse hiring, and there’s plenty to applaud.
Many of the major Fortune 500 employers have built programs to follow through on efforts toward neuroinclusivity, and some of t…
Over the past decade, I’ve watched leaders chase digital transformation like it was the only game in town. Faster systems, leaner processes, and smarter automation have been the goals. And yet, the organizations that are genuinely thriving in the “Imagination Era”—this moment defined by AI, volatility, and the premium on creative thinking—aren’t winning on technology alone. They’re winning on people. The question is: Do they actually know why?
I recently spoke with Angela Jackson, Harvard University lecturer, founder of Future Forward Strategies, and author of The Win-Win Workplace, whose research across more than 1,700 companies offers a data-backed answer. Her most striking finding? Most organizations still can’t measure what makes their people uniquely valuable—and that blind spot is becoming catastrophically expensive.
“If you don’t understand how humans are uniquely adding value, it’s really difficult to optimize for that,” said Jackson, who has a doctorate in education leadership from Harvard. She puts it in the sharpest possible terms: As companies race to deploy AI agents—some imagine one human managing 15 of them—the urgent question becomes what that one human needs to be genuinely good at. And most organizations haven’t done that audit.
Sentient intelligence
Jackson’s answer surprises leaders who expect a list of technical competencies. The capability she sees as most irreplaceable is relational systems intelligence, which is the ability to understand your own expertise relative to the broader ecosystem of colleagues, processes, and gaps around you. “Unless you’ve worked in an environment and deeply understand how the work gets done—not just your individual contribution, but as an ecosystem—it’s really difficult to replicate that,” she said.
This is what I call sentient intelligence: the distinctly human capacity for contextual awareness, embodied judgment, and relational knowing that no algorithm can replicate. For example, Jackson pointed to something that artificial intelligence still cannot do in real time: read the room. Knowing that Jim’s expression in a sales meeting signals skepticism, and pivoting accordingly, is sentient intelligence in action: a capability that belongs to the human in the loop, not the agent.
The same logic applies to strategy. Jackson’s research shows that the billion-dollar employee listening industry has a fundamental execution problem: Workers are asked for input constantly and rarely see it acted upon. What’s changing now is the ability to use AI itself to process frontline intelligence at scale and operationalize it into strategy in real time. Think of a bank teller who notices a pattern in customer complaints weeks before it surfaces in the C-suite. “Those tidbits of conversations matter,” Jackson said. The companies getting this right aren’t just listening; they’re asking the more courageous question: “What have we missed?”
Capability not pedigree
This is where skills-based hiring enters the conversation and where Jackson’s research lands its most actionable punch. Degrees, she argues, are a proxy for capability, not a proof of it. They measure seat time, not aptitude for doing. Organizations that have shifted to skills-based hiring are seeing talent costs drop, retention rates rise by 30% to 40%, and a widened aperture for talent that allows smaller companies to compete with giants. The future-ready organization isn’t filtering for pedigree; it’s filtering for demonstrated capability and learning agility.
But here’s what separates organizations that understand all of this from those that execute on it: leadership belief. Jackson calls the leaders driving these results the “Coalition of the Willing”—those who hold a fundamental conviction that people can learn, grow, and rise. This is my principle of “inside-out leadership” in practice. It isn’t a management technique. It’s a worldview. And it determines whether a leader invests time in people—the highest-leverage strategy in Jackson’s research—or simply pays the concept lip service.
Getting future-ready in an age of AI isn’t a technology problem. It’s a clarity problem. Get clear on what’s uniquely human in your organization. What’s the sentient intelligence your people bring to work every day? Get crisp about the skills that actually matter for each role. And ask yourself honestly: Do I believe my people can grow? The leaders who can say yes and mean it are already building the only competitive advantage that can’t be automated.
The U.S. has complex systems in place to support nearly every major financial milestone in life, from student loans for education and mortgages for homeownership to tax advantages for retirement. So why is caregiving for our loved ones—something that …
“I have to be honest. No one thought it was going to be possible. No one thought we would get as far as we’ve already gotten today.”
From humble beginnings to ultra wealthy status, Ronaldo’s $1.4 billion net worth proves the world’s most-followed athlete is also a wise businessman.
Amazon laid off 14,000 employees last fall, but CEO Andy Jassy denied the reductions were related to AI.
$7.2 billion AI founder Arvind Jain ‘observed’ Sundar Pichai at Google for years before he became CEO—he learned you need to ‘think crazy’ to be successful
