“Will AI take our jobs?”

"Wil AI take our jobs?"

I think we may be asking the wrong question.

AI brings uncertainty and risk for sure, and we are still learning, but I think it can fill a critical void that we often lose sight of.

The world's most persistent challenges – the ones that history will judge us for – aren’t constrained by a lack of ideas. They're constrained by our capacity to work together.

I’ve spent much of my career helping government, nonprofit, and private-sector collaborations across the finish line to address some very significant problems.

The biggest challenge at every turn?

Capacity.

Yet every successful partnership I’ve seen started because someone decided another conversation was worth having. Those conversations took time, persistence, and organizational capacity.

Relationship-building is slow, hard to measure, and rarely feels urgent…until it suddenly is. When resources get tight, it's the first thing off the list. This is something AI can actually change.

But while AI can both create the capacity for those partnerships to happen and get information into the room faster, it will never be the thing that makes people in the room trust one another. That still takes people. And it still takes time.

When you propose a new partnership, you have to build support inside your organization, and your counterpart has to do the same inside theirs. Multiply that across every organization involved, and those conversations become incredibly time-intensive. AI can't have those conversations, but it can create more room for them to happen.

The cross-sector response to the 2014 Ebola crisis is a perfect example. Governments, nonprofits, freight carriers, technology companies, mining firms, and countless others each contributed capabilities no single organization could provide alone. Unprecedented partnerships helped save thousands of lives. Imagine creating that kind of cross-sector capacity before a crisis instead of waiting for one, and then applying it to the persistent challenges that rarely make headlines but are just as hard to tackle. The opportunity to create real impact across a host of issues is tremendous.

Cross-sector collaboration requires trust and sustained engagement, and building those takes time. If AI creates more of that capacity, it won't simply make organizations more efficient, it will help them broaden their impact.

AI presents us with a lot of tough questions, no doubt about it. But as we ask questions about capabilities and outcomes that are not entirely clear from here, I encourage us to ask another:

"How can we invent pivitol new parternships with the capacity this creates?"