AI keynote speaker in Shanghai.

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

A working history here, not a market entry

Rahim founded EtonX, the online learning venture of Eton College, and began the business in China, partnering with schools in Shanghai and across the country. He has presented in China, and he later built EtonX operations in India as well. Before that he led Quizlet's international expansion across sixty countries.

That background is the reason the argument sounds the way it does. Twenty years spent on how people acquire capability, followed by a technology that removes the tasks through which they acquired it. The argument rests on research across more than 200 organisations in 30 countries since 2019, published openly and in full at the research estate, where every source is graded and the open questions stay visible.

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.

The evidence is more interesting than either the hype or the doom. Across 106 experiments, human and AI combinations performed worse on average than the better of human alone or AI alone, with the losses concentrated in decision-making. Clinicians whose unassisted detection rate fell after AI exposure. Students whose grades rose 48 per cent with an AI tutor and fell 17 per cent below a control group once it was removed. None of that says do not use AI. It says the design of the relationship decides the outcome.

What this page does not claim about China

No Chinese official statistic on AI adoption or AI-related employment is quoted here, because none has been verified at this site's standard, which is that the issuing body's own document was read at its own page. Where that has not been done, nothing is quoted. Saying so is more useful to a Shanghai audience than a number of unknown provenance would be.

What is verified, and travels, is the international shape. Japan's national survey of 22,000 employees found employer AI use at 12.9 per cent. Korea measured actual firm adoption at 2.7 per cent against 38.8 per cent of jobs scored as technically automatable. Singapore's regulator has written the loss of entry-level training grounds into national guidance. The regional account is at AI and work in Asia.

Practical

Multinational leadership teams, regional headquarters, international schools and education groups, and corporate conferences in Shanghai and elsewhere in China. Delivery is in English only. Simultaneous interpretation is arranged by the host where required. 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 Chinese-language summary of this argument is at the Chinese page, published in Chinese because the reader reads Chinese, 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.