What If AI Could Make You More Valuable?
The first time a child sees their favorite character skate across the ice, something happens that no screen has ever been able to replicate.
They’ve watched the cartoon. They’ve worn the t-shirt. They fell asleep clutching the stuffed animal so many nights it’s missing an eye. They already love Mickey Mouse. And then the lights go down, the music rises, and he appears, full size, impossibly real, moving through actual space. The child’s face does something that has no name. It isn’t just excitement. It is the moment when something you have only imagined becomes undeniably, overwhelmingly real.
I’ve watched that moment happen thousands of times from the vestibules of arenas across the world or from the seats among the crowd and what I know in my bones is this: all that content that came before, the cartoons, the pajamas, the bedding, the stuffed toys, it didn’t compete with the live experience. It created the hunger for it. Every touchpoint made the real moment more powerful, more anticipated, more sacred.
Nobody walks out of Disney on Ice thinking, “well, I guess I don’t need Mickey anymore.”
They bought more Mickey merchandise and downloaded more digital content.
That is not a coincidence. Every new way to experience something you love makes you want the real thing more. The content feeds the craving. The live moment is still the destination.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because the professional world is currently having a version of the same panic we’ve seen every time a new technology emerges and this time, it’s louder.
The headlines are real. Nearly 55,000 job cuts in 2025 were directly attributed to AI. Ford’s CEO warned it will replace half of all white-collar workers. Salesforce’s CEO claimed AI is already doing up to 50% of his company’s workload. CNBC reported that labor market confidence among high earners is near historic lows. The anxiety is not imagined, it is rational and routed in data.
What I would like to add to this conversation, coming from someone who spent two decades producing experiences that every piece of emerging technology was supposed to make obsolete: the technology never replaced the experience. It made people hungrier for it.
Streaming didn’t kill live music. Social media made live moments more shareable, not less necessary. Super Bowl LIX drew an all-time record 126.7 million live viewers in a world where you can watch anything, anytime, on any device. People still stopped what they were doing. They still gathered. They still needed to feel something at the same time as someone else.
This what I think is partially underneath the fear, and it is worth naming directly. It is not just about jobs. It is about identity. So many of us, especially high-achievers who have invested decades into becoming experts through education and work experience, have quietly fused who we are with what we do. And when what we do suddenly feels threatened, it triggers something much deeper than career anxiety. It feels like an existential question: If AI can do this, what am I actually for?
That question deserves a real answer, not a motivational poster.
The next generation will be AI-native. They will adopt it the way millennials adopted the internet, instinctively, fluently, without the weight of what came before. For those of us who aren’t native, the transition is harder. Our expertise is real. Our investment is real. And the disorientation is real. But so is something else: human beings. We are inherently creative, whether we identify that way or not. We adapt. We always have. It’s actually part of what constitutes our species.
The opportunity right now is not to compete with AI. It is to get very clear about where AI cannot follow you. Think about what you alone bring to a negotiation, a client relationship, a difficult conversation, a room full of people who need someone to hold the energy. Think about the judgment calls that only work because of everything you have lived through. Think about the trust people extend to you specifically, not to a role, not to a title, but to you. That is not automatable. That is actually more valuable in a world where everything routine gets handed to a machine. The irreplaceable rises.
And it cannot follow you into the room.
The gasp when the human cannonball launches. The vibrations from the monster truck engine. The stranger next to you who grabs your arm. The moment in a workshop when someone says the thing the whole room was afraid to say and everyone exhales together. That is the product. I learned to produce it for tens of thousands of people globally and I've carried it into rooms of twelve. The scale changes. The principle doesn't.
AI should be your lighting rig. But it is not the show. YOU are the show.
What is YOUR version of a live show? Not your resume, not your credentials. The thing YOU do that lands differently when YOU are physically present. The conversation that shifts when you walk in. The room that changes because of how YOU read it, respond to it, hold it.
So here is where to start.
Name three moments in your career when the room changed because you were in it. Not your deck. YOU.
Look honestly at what you are outsourcing to efficiency and ask if any of it is actually your superpower in disguise.
Show up somewhere in person this week when a screen would have been easier. Notice what happens.
The pivot that matters right now is not away from AI. It is toward a sharper, more honest understanding of what only you can do when you are fully present. That clarity is your competitive advantage. That is the thing no model, no agent, no system can replicate.
And if you want a room where you can practice it, with real people asking the same questions, doing the same work, in real time.
That is exactly what Pivot With Purpose is built for. This community is not a newsletter list. It is a live show. Curated, intentional, built for impact and connection and the occasional moment where someone says the thing that makes the whole room exhale.
In an AI world, that is not a nice-to-have. It is the whole point.
I’ll see you in the arena.
From Your Biggest Champion,
Nicole
