Disruption has a shape we recognize. Something arrives, shakes things up, a new normal emerges. We adjust and move on.

For me: getting a little sibling (though I don't remember that one). The DVD. The death of the DVD. Cell phones. The internet. Even Covid.

You could make the case that AI is a disruption. We're certainly oohing and ahhing (and simultaneously quaking in our boots) at what it can do. It's changing how we work, what we make, and how we value our time. If it were just a disruption, maybe eventually all this AI stuff would start to feel normal and we’d go back to some version of business as usual.

But the AI moment we're living through is sitting on top of something more profoundly disorienting. Geopolitics, economics, the environment, technology: the pace and scale of change across all of it means there is no stable shore waiting on the other side of this sea of change. No new normal to settle into.

That's discontinuity. Disruption shakes things up and resolves. Discontinuity doesn't resolve. The old maps stop working because the territory itself has changed.

Default to building rather than preserving.

Under pressure, most organizations default to preservation, doubling down on the choices they made in their last strategic plan. Artificial Intelligence makes that easier than ever: it's extraordinarily good at helping you do more of what you already do. That can feel like progress for a while.

And then the market shifts or a competitor builds something new. You realize you've built momentum, but it’s taking you in the wrong direction. The temptation is to double down again, which is why organizations using AI to do more of the same may not have anything to preserve in a year or two. Discontinuity doesn't reward optimization of the old model.

Of course, I can't tell you what to build toward. Each organization is different. But I can tell you that whatever it is, you'll need humans to get there.

When your team becomes more efficient with AI, you better know what that's for.

With our work with AI Leaps, we’re still seeing a lot of organizations that don't know their ‘AI why’ well enough to explain to their employees what they’re supposed to do with all their newly expanded capacity. Without guidance, some people take on an extra client. Some check their email more. Some close their computers, go to yoga, throw a baseball with their kid, or have a piña colada.

In most of those cases, the organization never captures the value it was supposed to unlock.

We recently ran our third cohort of a Manager Leaps program for an EdTech company. At the graduation, a finance leader described how, when she joined the company six years ago, her team spent roughly 60% of their time on transactional work. Now, AI and automation are handling many of those tasks faster, more accurately, and at scale. The efficiency is real. But so is the fear underneath it: team members wondering whether their skills are becoming obsolete, whether the work creating efficiencies might eventually eliminate their own roles.

That manager took it on herself to guide her team through that transition. Not just telling them what was changing, but coaching them into a new kind of contribution. She explained the shift this way: "from processing transactions to interpreting what transactions mean. From following a process to designing and improving it. From producing numbers to explaining what they mean and why they matter." As she put it, "our purpose isn't to compete with AI. It's to do what humans do best: think, interpret, challenge, explain, and bring context."

That reorientation matters everywhere, but it's existential in professional services. In accounting, for example, the efficiency gains from AI on compliance, documentation, and reporting are significant. Thriving firms are reinvesting those gains in strategic advisory that builds trust with and retains clients. We're calling this Advisory Intelligence: the uniquely human intelligence that Artificial Intelligence cannot replicate. The other AI.

Advisory Intelligence is where smart firms are investing right now. But discontinuity doesn't stop at the client relationship. It asks something of the whole organization.

Discontinuity is a team sport.

Leaders need the ability to see the system they’re inside of, the curiosity to question it, the narrative power to bring others along, and the learning agility to keep moving when the answers keep changing. These aren't soft skills in the pejorative sense. In discontinuity, they're how you find your way.

But, in a world where individual experience is losing its value for making future decisions, we have to shift our aperture to the collective. As my colleague Ryan Jasperson put it, “Collective intelligence isn't a cultural preference or a collaboration style. It's a different unit of analysis entirely. The question stops being ‘what does this individual leader need to know?’ and becomes ‘what can this group see together that none of them could see alone?’” The work is to make the room not only smarter than the smartest person in it, but smarter than the sum of its parts.

Amelia is going to write next about what that looks like in a room with a partner who is game to do that hard work.

For now, a few things worth holding onto: know your AI why. Reinvest your efficiency gains in uniquely human work. And don't let the disruption distract you from the discontinuity underneath it.