The Braveheart CIO · Essay
The World Needs a New Narrative
Every story about artificial intelligence is a choice between two roads. One ends in a cul de sac. The other builds a bridge.
It's Friday, July 31st. Rye bread, avocado and smoked salmon ready for breakfast; daily vitamins lined up; the smell of coffee dominates the kitchen: all is ready to start the day along with my newsletter. One title from a major newspaper caught my attention: "Could AI take your job? Some workers in China already know the answer."
I have little sympathy for these types of titles, but after my business trips to China over the last years, I know the future is there and I don't miss an opportunity to stay in touch. So I read the article, in the hope of learning something new.
The facts reported in the article are that Apollo Go, an AI-powered robotaxi company, is displacing the jobs of taxi drivers; and of course taxi drivers are unhappy. The malfunctioning of a new type of vehicle has recently been causing chaos on the city's roads where the robotaxis are being tested.
But beyond the facts, the tone of the article is the hook into your fears, and — most importantly — it tells you what you actually want to hear. To have one more reason to complain against an unjust world, or the government, or the titans of Silicon Valley.
The article doesn't ask a question. It answers it before the reader has a chance to think.
It's the hopeless, narrow-minded, fearful forecast about "AI is taking your job" that I call the cul de sac narrative.
From hopeless
During my business encounters, I experience that the people who elaborate the cul de sac narrative have a louder voice in the conversation, in a way that is unproductive and ineffective. Actually, I have to say there is little of a conversation with people who are in a deadlock of making those sorts of statements in all shapes and forms, without any intention to generate a new idea that is worth experimenting with for the sake of making this world a better place.
Therefore articles like this one almost contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy: because the people who feed themselves with fear will lose the lucidity to make new plans for their life, will not make decisions, will not evaluate new options, will definitely lose their job — and will not be able to find a new one.
And that will not be only because of AI. It will be also because of their attitude.
The cul de sac narrative doesn't give you a way out: it's happening and you can't do anything about it. You cannot even go backward. The only thing you can do is try to resist as long as you can to delay the damage. Maybe you will retire before you lose your job.
"Could AI take your job? Some workers in China already know the answer" is actually a way to give a definitive and negative answer to the question. It's a way to say: "game over, you are out."
I feel deep sympathy for the taxi drivers in China. But I also feel these discussions about "finding a corner that AI cannot replace" are trying to escape reality. They treat AI as an enemy to run from, and eventually it will probably catch up.
But hopeless is just the result of a narrow-minded approach.
From narrow-minded
We have at least two hundred years of high-paced technological evolution on our planet (discounting the very slow evolution of the previous three thousand years) where, systematically, new technology has displaced jobs in one sector while creating far more jobs in new sectors that didn't exist before.
At the beginning of the 1800s we were ~1 billion people on the planet, and we are ~8 billion now. Several billion more people are working today because of the technology that we have been able to produce. Not despite technology. Because of technology.
And here is a number worth holding on to: the OECD unemployment rate has been at or below 5% for more than four years — 4.9% in May 2026 — a period that spans the entire ChatGPT era and the entire "AI will destroy jobs" panic. Employment across OECD countries is at an all-time high. The OECD's own 2026 Employment Outlook goes further, concluding that evidence of AI's impact on workers is so far limited, and that cyclical factors and longer-term shifts in skills demand are the more significant drivers. Graduate unemployment has indeed been rising — but that trend began well before generative AI arrived. If the headline were already true, we would see it in those series by now.
Therefore, nurturing in the world just a narrative of fear that AI is going to take our job means showing no wisdom of the lessons that we should have learned by now very well.
Of course AI is a different story altogether; because it's a "thinking" technology; because it's able to improve itself. But this is for me an even stronger argument to prove that the implications of its implementation will go much beyond what we have seen so far and will be therefore un-predictable. And we cannot just go from being "un-predictable" to being "disastrous": that's a cul de sac mindset issue, not a technology issue.
AI is definitely going to transform our lives, but we still don't know how — just as we had no clue what the internet and the iPhone would go on to transform. Nobody in 1995 predicted that a network for sharing academic documents would end up reorganising retail, dating and the news. Nobody in 2007 predicted that the most consequential labour effect of a touchscreen phone would be to create ride-hailing driving as a global occupation for millions of people. There will be job losses, for sure. And new jobs will be created as a consequence of that same transformation. But at this point nobody can strike the balance between the jobs created, the ones erased, and the impact on how we live and work. Not me. Not the people selling you the end of the story.
From fearful predictions
I can't count the people who are making the worst predictions about the negative impact that AI is going to produce on the world. It is worth reading the book The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction, authored by Nate Silver, who gives a very fact-based perspective on how miserable we are at making predictions. No matter if we are talking weather, or earthquakes, or financial crises, we are overwhelmed by predictions — and, interestingly, most of them are dramatic. The vast majority of them are wrong. But they are the ones that sell better. Human beings are biased toward bad news.
How far is AI going to improve? To what extent is it going to be able to execute intellectual tasks done today by humans? And to what extent are these tasks going to become mechanical, when they are put into the "brain" of a robot? Is Artificial General Intelligence going to be a reality? And when?
Nobody knows. But the market of bad predictions is a very easy market to be in, because that's what we always liked to hear.
It's so ironic that while the DNA of AI is actually machine learning, human beings are apparently so weak at learning from history and past mistakes.
So much so that our predictions continue to be miserably contradicted by how history unfolds.
This is the narrative I refuse. This is the narrative we all should refuse. That's why we need to move from a cul de sac to a bridge narrative: something that can bring us into a future that is on the other side of where we are now. A narrative that inspires courage, adaptability and opportunities.
To courage
The etymology of the word courage comes from the Latin word cor, which means "heart." With the heart we love. When we love, we do care, we are moved by the enormous force of passion, and we are able to overcome any sort of obstacle. And I am not going to invent anything new by saying that the most important thing we love is our life. The emotional state of courage puts us in a completely different mindset from what fear can generate, and it activates a new universe of resources that otherwise stay blocked inside us. Fear generates "fight or flight"; but you may fly in the wrong direction, and you may lose when you fight the beast.
But there is also another important element that generates courage, and that is will: do we want to accept a doomed future, or do we want to build a better one?
That's the choice that a leader makes.
To adaptability
Not far from where I live, the Natural History Museum in London offers visitors the awe-inspiring sight of dinosaur skeletons — mighty creatures that ruled the earth for millions of years, yet vanished. The lesson is old: strength is no guarantee of survival. Adaptability is. Charles Darwin captured the principle in On the Origin of Species, back in 1859 — that the species which endure are those best fitted to their changing environment.
The famous book Who Moved My Cheese?, by Spencer Johnson, made the point as well in 1998. The secret sauce to survival is being adaptive to change. It's not about resisting change.
A few weeks ago I received an invitation from a British newspaper for an interview about AI; the theme of the interview was about what type of subjects I should recommend students study in order to be guaranteed a job in the era of AI. I replied positively to the agent who reached out, but I also said that my recommendation was not about recommending to study this subject or that subject.
And the reason for this is what I have experienced in my entire professional career in technology. I did graduate as an electronic engineer, but I ended up with a CIO job that not only was not on my radar screen, but had not even been invented during my course of study. And during my career I have seen emerging jobs that nobody could have ever predicted. I didn't study to be a CIO. But still I got the number-one job in the IT industry. Only because I was listening to the signals, and I was adapting my next move.
The agent didn't call me back to interview me. My advice was not her advice. My advice didn't sell, in her opinion.
To opportunities
Instead, genuine thought needs to be put into how people can be integrated into an AI-empowered workforce.
When cars were invented — and therefore the whole sector of transportation by horse was erased — it created the sectors of road construction, motels, gas stations, petrol, insurance, and road police. Of course the transition period creates casualties, especially for those who do not have the energy and the attitude to change, and who want at any cost to continue to run their horse-transportation business.
Likewise, AI is already opening opportunities that didn't exist in the past: enjoy the fascinating journey in the book Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity, by Eric Topol, to get a very comprehensive view of the positive impact that it's already having on the health system. And I mean health! The single and most valuable asset of our life!
The platform "Farmer.chat" is already giving professional advice to farmers in Africa to improve the yield of their crops; and this is going to be accessible to people who otherwise would have no way to understand how to improve the quality of their agricultural production.
Before the pandemic, many people working in London had to commute every day two hours one way to the office; nobody was ever challenging that madness. It took just a weekend to turn working from home into a new reality; and now normality is to commute to work two or three days a week. We were forced to move from a cul de sac narrative and we crossed the bridge.
"There will be less work" — even if this is the case, what is so wrong about us working less? We once moved from a seven-day workweek to five. Four days are being trialled in plenty of economies. Maybe that means layoffs. Maybe it means healthier lives. Probably both, unevenly. We can sit on our hands and predict, or we can aim to build the better option. A new bridge.
I have seen many people turn a displacement into a beginning. Not because losing work is a blessing — it isn't — but because the alternative was a job they had stopped growing in years earlier. That is what a bridge means.
There will be casualties. But let them not be the price of our failure to inspire people with the courage to embrace change and seek new opportunities.
And let me be clear about what a bridge narrative is not. It must not be confused with telling displaced workers simply to be positive. Courage is not a substitute for support. People need access to training, time to adapt, employers willing to redesign jobs, and institutions prepared to share the gains of AI fairly. The bridge must be built collectively, not crossed by individuals alone.
The truth is, so far AI is proving to improve at lightspeed. And, contrary to any technology we have seen until now, it is going up the ladder in terms of the level of complexity that it can handle in comparison to human beings.
That has pushed me, personally, to go up the ladder too, and to stimulate a quest for my new identity that otherwise might not have started.
The cul de sac narrative sells very well, because it hooks into our fears.
So the new narrative I am calling for is not blind optimism. It combines courage with humility, adaptability with institutional responsibility, and hope with an honest account of who may bear the costs.
The world needs a new narrative. Of courage, adaptation and opportunities. That is more difficult to evangelize, but it can inspire us to build a better world.
Which one are you going to lead at the watercooler today?
Benedetto Conversano is a former Global CIO at Diageo, Avon and Jerónimo Martins, a non-executive director, keynote speaker, and author of The Braveheart CIO: Why Every CEO Needs One at the Table.