AI is taking over the production side of the equation. LLMs operate at scale, drafting 30% of Microsoft's code, processing billions of lines daily and generating slides at pace. Employees are pushed into strategic work sooner than they used to be.
Much of the work done at a desk doesn't have a right answer. It lives in degrees of grey — the space of judgement.
The new differentiator among talent is exactly that judgement. If AI generates hundreds of pull requests overnight, who reviews them? Speed of decision-making is the bottleneck. Organisations must design workflows that batch decisions and strategically position humans.
Hiring changes and freezes are already happening, as the model of junior workers generating and senior workers judging is no longer the reality. At the same time, experience builds judgement. What could be new pathways for young people coming into the workforce to build the necessary experience for the world of fast-changing work?
The doubling of task length suggests AI could soon tackle multi-hour, judgement-based work — like document analysis — where good enough suffices. Yet for tasks with dependencies or high stakes, human oversight will temper this trend, highlighting a dual-speed evolution in AI adoption.
The question is not whether decision-making will remain human. It is how organisations design for a world where the production bottleneck has been removed, and the judgement bottleneck is all that remains.