The question underneath the forecasts
Most future of work sessions run on projections: how many roles change, how many hours shift, what percentage of tasks are exposed. The forecasting evidence is weaker than the confidence with which it is usually presented, and this research is explicit about that, including where it cuts against its own position.
The sturdier question is about how capability is built. A career has always been a ladder of work: the first draft, the initial analysis, the routine review, done badly, corrected, done again. That is not filler on the way to seniority. It is the mechanism. And it is the layer that automates first, because it is the most routine.
Four ideas the room is given, each with a page behind it
The missing rungs. What happens to a pipeline when the work people became senior on is the work that goes first.
Synthetic seniority. Output that looks senior, produced by somebody who has not acquired senior judgement. It holds until the first situation the tool has not seen.
Capability debt. The accumulated cost of competence quietly traded for speed, which comes due at the moment that required judgement, and that moment is rarely scheduled.
The seven human skills. Which capabilities grow more valuable as the tools spread, from SuperSkills (Kogan Page, 2026).
What the evidence actually supports
Students whose grades rose 48 per cent with an AI tutor and fell 17 per cent below a control group once it was taken away. That pair of numbers is the whole argument about learning in one line: the assistance worked, and it was not the same as having learned.
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 exposure to an AI tool.
None of that argues against using these systems. It argues that the design of the relationship decides the outcome, which is a management question rather than a technology one. Every figure resolves to a graded source in the research estate, which records what each study does not prove.
Why this speaker on this subject
Twenty years building education technology before writing about it. Founded EtonX, the online learning venture of Eton College, starting the business in China and partnering with schools in Shanghai and across the country. Led Quizlet’s international expansion across sixty countries. The subject of how people acquire capability is not an adjacent interest here; it is the whole working life that came before the book.
SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI is published by Kogan Page, and the research behind it is published openly rather than held back as proprietary.
The audiences this fits
Cross-sector conferences, HR and people functions, whole organisations, and education. The whole-organisation version of this talk is We Are Superheroes: the seven human skills, carried by a family story across four generations and three continents. Audiences arrive thinking AI is the story and leave knowing they are.
Also at HR and CHRO conferences, early careers and graduate talent, and schools and education.
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.
