The measurement that makes this concrete
Polish endoscopists averaging twenty-eight years of experience saw their unassisted adenoma detection rate fall from 28.4 to 22.4 per cent after routine exposure to an AI tool, measured on procedures performed without it. Experienced clinicians, a real clinical endpoint, and the loss appears in what they could do alone.
It is one study in one specialty and it is observational, which is said on stage rather than left out. What it establishes is that the effect is not a worry about the future. It has been measured in people who were already expert.
Why output is the wrong instrument
In a 2026 experiment, novice programmers using unrestricted AI and those using a scaffolded version produced work a manager could not tell apart: both beat the unassisted control on functional output and did not differ from each other. Then the tool was removed for a maintenance task. The unrestricted group failed at 77 per cent against 39 per cent for the scaffolded group.
Thirty-eight points apart on whether the work can be maintained next year, and indistinguishable on everything an organisation currently measures. That gap is what this estate calls capability debt, and it is why a productivity number cannot tell a board whether it is accumulating.
The part that shows up in hiring rather than in performance
Employment of 22 to 25 year olds in AI-exposed occupations sits about 19 per cent below where it would have been had it tracked their less-exposed peers, and the divergence runs through reduced hiring rather than redundancy. Nobody is pushed off the ladder; the lower rungs stop being built.
For an organisation that is a succession problem disguised as a saving, and it surfaces about a decade after the decision. The research is at the missing rungs and synthetic seniority.
What the session leaves behind
A way to measure the variable nobody is measuring. Not tool adoption, which is already counted and says nothing, but whether named capabilities are still held: what the organisation must be able to do unaided, who can currently do it, and when that was last tested. The instrument is at the capability audit.
And the design principle underneath the blackout result. The scaffolded group did the same work with the same tool and kept the competence, so the difference was configuration. That is the argument of the signature keynote, Drift versus Design.
Where this differs from the judgement talk
The judgement session asks which decisions should stay with people. This one asks whether the people will still be able to make them. A leadership team that has allocated judgement carefully and let the underlying capability lapse has solved the first problem and not the second. The other page is at speaker on AI and human judgement.
Neither is a compliance talk. Oversight, regulation and accountability have their own page at human oversight and accountability.
The evidence, published in full
The whole argument is set out with every source graded and its limits stated at human capability in the age of AI, and the state of what is actually known at what we know about AI and human capability. The full base runs to 367 graded studies, each with what it does and does not prove, at the evidence base. A booker can read every claim before the room fills.
The three keynotes, and which fits this room
Keynotes run 30 to 90 minutes, in person or virtual. A 30-minute main-stage version of each talk is available for conferences; the full argument needs 40 or more. The sector examples change for the room; the argument does not. All three, with the showreel, are at keynotes, and the programme copy is at the speaker pack.
Drift versus Design
Drift versus Design: why most organisations hand their judgement to AI without deciding to, and how to design your way through instead.
Most organisations are adopting AI by drift: a thousand reasonable decisions that add up to judgement nobody chose to give away. Rahim Hirji, author of SuperSkills, shows leaders which mode they are running, where AI sharpens judgement and where it weakens it, and hands them the controls.
We Are Superheroes
We Are Superheroes: AI is the suit. The human decides.
AI makes everyone faster, stronger and more capable. It does not decide; people do. Through a family story across four generations and three continents, Rahim Hirji hands the audience the seven human skills that grow more valuable as the tools spread. They arrive thinking AI is the story and leave knowing they are.
WTH (What the Human)
WTH (What the Human): a live test of a board's own judgement.
Business is being rewired as AI arrives, and human judgement is leaving with it. In three acts, Rahim Hirji shows a board what AI is changing in how organisations run, then ends with a live test of the board's own judgement, in the room and in real time. Nobody forgets the result.
