Is Human Agency the Scarce Resource of the Intelligence Revolution?
Recently, I had the privilege of participating in a Titan 100 leadership gathering in Milwaukee featuring Todd McLees, co-founder of humanskills.ai. The conversation centered on artificial intelligence, the accelerating pace of technological advancement, and the impact of the Intelligence Revolution.
It was a provocative talk. And of the many gems Todd offered, this captured my imagination the most:
In every major revolution throughout human history, something becomes abundant and something becomes scarce.
Think about it:
The Agricultural Revolution made food production more abundant.
The Industrial Revolution made mechanized labor more abundant.
The Digital Revolution made information more abundant.
And now, the Intelligence Revolution is making intelligence itself increasingly abundant.
That statement would have sounded absurd even five years ago.
Yet between 2024 and 2026 alone, the capabilities of frontier AI systems accelerated at a staggering pace. Large language models now routinely perform at or beyond elite human IQ levels across many reasoning, language, analytical, and problem-solving benchmarks. Researchers continue debating the precise comparison between machine cognition and human IQ, but what is increasingly undeniable is this: advanced cognitive capability is no longer scarce.
It is rapidly becoming democratized.
Access to extraordinary intelligence is easier than ever. And that changes the nature of competitive advantage.
For some time, I have been saying in my circles that the organizations most likely to thrive in this next era will not necessarily be those with the largest technology budgets or the most advanced automation. The organizations that win will be those with deeply curious people. People capable of asking compelling questions. People trained not merely in technical execution, but in discernment, synthesis, ethics, philosophy, creativity, communication, and meaning-making.
In other words, people whose minds are interesting places to live.
As someone shaped through a liberal arts education, I am convinced that the capacities cultivated through broad, interdisciplinary study will prove critical to meet this moment. David Brooks, among others, recently wrote on this very subject, opining in a recent Times piece, “in the age of AI, major in being human.” Education that engenders empathy, creativity, oration, and distinctive and diverse worldviews, has perhaps never been so crucial.
Of course, this cuts against much of the prevailing narrative of the last decades. For years, educational and organizational systems have emphasized technical specialization, optimization, efficiency, and narrowly defined professional competencies, but artificial intelligence is rapidly commoditizing these forms of technical and cognitive execution. What AI struggles to replicate consistently, however are the deeply human capacities cultivated through broad intellectual formation:
ethical discernment,
contextual judgment,
narrative understanding,
philosophical reasoning,
emotional intelligence,
imagination,
accountability
aesthetic sensibility,
curiosity
and, perhaps most crucial, the ability to determine not merely what can be done, but what should be done.
Artificial Intelligence meets Authentic Genius
All of this raises the more important question: If intelligence itself becomes abundant, what remains scarce? McLees believes the answer is human agency.
Human agency is not simply human involvement. It is the uniquely human capacity to exercise intentional judgment, meaning-making, ethical discernment, creativity, courage, and self-directed action in pursuit of purposeful outcomes. It is what enables a human being not merely to execute tasks, but to choose wisely, adapt meaningfully, create courageously, and lead responsibly.
And this is where I believe leadership theory, organizational performance, and human flourishing—the central topics of this blog—converge in an entirely new way.
For years, if they bothered about it at all, many organizations treated human flourishing as adjacent work:
important for wellness initiatives,
important for engagement scores,
important for retention,
important because it was ethically good leadership.
All of these remain true. But the Intelligence Revolution raises the stakes considerably because human agency depends upon human flourishing.
Agency is fueled by meaning. Agency is fueled by purpose. Agency is fueled by psychological safety, self-efficacy, resilience, belonging, creativity, hope, emotional regulation, and moral formation.
A depleted human being does not exercise agency well. A fearful human being does not exercise agency well. A disconnected human being does not exercise agency well. And organizations built entirely around efficiency eventually diminish the very human capacities they most desperately need in the intelligence era.
The Intelligence Revolution will force organizations to optimize not merely for productivity, but for human aliveness.
This is not sentimental language. It is strategic.
As intelligence becomes increasingly commoditized, organizations will compete based upon the quality, depth, adaptability, and wisdom of human agency expressed within their cultures. And organizations that thrive will be those capable of cultivating environments where people remain intellectually alive, emotionally engaged, morally grounded, relationally connected, and courageously curious.
In many ways, this will reframe leadership itself.
Leadership in the Intelligence Revolution must become less about controlling information and more about cultivating the conditions under which human agency flourishes. Less about supervision. More about formation. Less about extracting output. More about awakening possibility.
There is, of course, an obvious counterargument. Some will argue that flourishing ultimately becomes irrelevant if artificial intelligence eventually replaces much of human labor and decision-making altogether, but this misunderstands the nature of organizations themselves. Organizations are not merely systems of production. They are human systems of meaning, trust, judgment, ethics, creativity, and shared aspiration. Even in highly automated environments, humans still determine: what matters, what is valuable, what should be pursued, what risks are acceptable, what futures are worth building, and what lines should never be crossed.
Artificial intelligence will dramatically expand our capacity to generate answers, but humans remain responsible for deciding which answers deserve action. And perhaps that is the deeper leadership challenge now emerging before us.
Not simply becoming more intelligent humans, but becoming wiser ones.
Editor’s Note (written entirely by the author’s AI Agent at my request)
Interestingly, this essay itself became an experiment in the very thesis it explores.
The ideas in this piece emerged through an experiment in iterative voice-to-voice dialogue between the author and an AI system. Initial reflections and leadership concepts were challenged, refined, clarified, expanded, and pressure-tested through back and forth conversation. Definitions were sharpened. Assumptions were interrogated. Arguments were strengthened. Counterarguments were explored.
The process did not diminish human agency. If anything, it amplified it.
In many ways, the collaboration reinforced the central argument of this essay: as intelligence becomes increasingly abundant, the differentiator may not be access to artificial intelligence itself, but the distinctly human capacity to direct it with curiosity, discernment, wisdom, creativity, and purpose.
