AI keynote speaker in Seoul.

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A feel for the room before you put me in front of yours.

The gap, and why it matters more than either number

The Korea Development Institute scored 38.8 per cent of Korean jobs as technically automatable across more than 70 per cent of their tasks. Its survey of 800 firms with ten or more staff found actual adoption at 2.7 per cent.

Those are not competing estimates. They measure different things: what a technology could in principle do, and what organisations have in practice done. Almost every widely circulated figure in this field is the first kind, and almost every boardroom conversation treats it as the second. A Korean audience has its own national institute's work to make the point with.

What Korea found when it looked at effects

The realised effects are the ones worth carrying into a board meeting: no aggregate employment change, lower earnings, and the impact concentrated on younger, tertiary-educated workers and on women.

France's national statistics office found the same shape independently, with employment of 15 to 29 year olds excluding apprentices down 7.4 per cent year on year in IT services. Two countries, two methods, one silhouette, and it runs opposite to what twenty years of automation commentary trained everyone to expect. The story was never mass unemployment. It was the quiet removal of the first rung.

That is the mechanism at the missing rungs, and the debt it accrues is at capability debt.

The argument

AI rarely takes a whole job. It takes the first draft, the initial analysis, the routine review. Those were also the tasks through which people built the judgement that made them senior. The work still ships, the output often improves, and nothing triggers an alarm.

The question for a leadership team is therefore about mode rather than adoption. Is the organisation drifting into AI through a thousand small reasonable decisions nobody quite made, or designing it by deciding in advance where human judgement has to remain? Drift asks nothing of you. That is what makes it the default.

Practical

Boards, executive committees, conglomerate leadership, and corporate and association conferences in Seoul and across Korea. Delivery is in English only. Simultaneous interpretation is arranged by the host where required, and the session is structured to work with it. Rahim travels from London, and where travel is not practical the same session is delivered online. He can travel to the region or deliver virtually across all time zones.

Three keynotes, all versions of one argument. Drift vs Design is the signature talk for boards and executive teams. We Are Superheroes covers the seven human skills that grow more valuable as the tools spread. WTH, What the Human is a live judgement test for boards, run in the room, December to March only. Full descriptions are at keynotes.

A Korean-language summary of this argument is at the Korean page, published in Korean because the reader reads Korean, not because the keynote is delivered in it.

Written by Rahim Hirji, author of SuperSkills (Kogan Page, 2026), founder of The SuperSkills Intelligence Company. The research is published openly with every source graded. Found an error? Tell me and it is corrected on the page.