At a recent TEDCG event in Dubai, leadership expert Vinciane Beauchene made the case that the wrong question is dominating the conversation about artificial intelligence and work. Instead of asking whether AI will eliminate jobs over the next decade, she argues organizations should be asking where human contribution will still matter most — and designing around that answer deliberately, rather than by default.

Beauchene opens by revisiting Alan Turing's mid-20th-century benchmark for machine intelligence: a machine that could hold a conversation indistinguishably from a human. Today, she notes, most everyday chatbots clear that bar with ease — yet the achievement says surprisingly little about what people are actually for in an AI-saturated workplace. She treats this as evidence that the entire framing of the AI-jobs debate needs an update, not that the Turing test failed.

Drawing on her consulting work with corporate leadership teams, including a case study involving AI sales agents, Beauchene walks through common assumptions about which skills are supposedly "AI-proof" and challenges several of them directly. Her broader argument is that human value in the workplace won't simply vanish as automation spreads — it will relocate to different points in the organization, particularly toward judgment calls, relationship-building, and situations that call for deeper, more intentional engagement.

The talk closes with a reframing of what it means to be human at work in this new environment: not a fallback position once machines have taken the routine tasks, but a deliberate practice that organizations need to invest in and design for. Beauchene's central message to leaders is that the pace of AI adoption may be out of their hands, but how their organizations climb with it — and where they choose to place human judgment — is very much a design decision.