The same pattern, everywhere he looked.
He spent twenty years building the technology that changed how people work. Then seven years studying what it did to them.
Rahim Hirji is the author of SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI (Kogan Page, 2026), a keynote speaker and advisor on AI, work and human judgement, and the writer of Box of Amazing, a weekly letter written since 2017 and read by 25,000 people. He spent twenty years building education technology, including founding EtonX, later acquired by Eton College, and leading international growth at Quizlet across more than 60 countries. Since 2019 his research has covered more than 200 organisations in over 30 countries. He is based in London.
For twenty years Rahim worked inside companies being changed by technology. Across more than 200 organisations in 30 countries, he kept seeing the same thing: leaders would invest in better tools, then wonder why their people could not keep up. The tools changed. The problem never did.
That pattern was not only professional. It ran through his own family. His parents arrived in the UK as migrants and built their lives through education, perseverance and service to others. Across four generations and three continents, what carried each one through was never the technology available to them. It was curiosity, adaptability, judgement, and the willingness to start again.
Those are human skills. They are exactly what is now at risk in the age of AI. That insight became SuperSkills.