There’s a strange moment that happens the first time an AI tool outperforms you at something you once believed defined your value. It catches you off guard, not because the technology is impressive, but because of the way it presses directly against your identity. If your craft has been a central part of how you understand yourself, and a system suddenly does that craft with greater speed, clarity, or intelligence, you’re forced to confront a question you never wanted to ask: what’s left when the thing you’re good at stops being scarce?

When I first started using agentic AI across my work as a designer and strategist, I didn’t feel excited. I felt uneasy. The ground shifted under me. Work that once required late nights and deep concentration suddenly took a fraction of the time. Responses came back clearer than my own thinking. Structures appeared before I finished forming the idea. Designs took shape faster than I could define direction. And instead of feeling empowered, I felt afraid. If this can do my job better and faster, what am I here for?

But once I sat with that discomfort, something unexpected surfaced. It wasn’t displacement. It was freedom. As soon as I stopped treating AI like a threat to my identity and started treating it like a thinking partner, I realized my value wasn’t disappearing. It was moving. The work improved. The quality rose. The pace intensified. I started delivering twelve-week projects in four weeks, not because I cut corners, but because I finally had the space to focus on the parts of the work that actually matter. Instead of burning time on execution, I could focus on thinking: diagnosing the problem, shaping the vision, directing the experience, evaluating the nuance, and refining the story. I wasn’t losing my role. I was stepping into the part of my role that had always held the most value.

The more I leaned into these tools, the more agency I felt. I didn’t expect that. It showed up first in the work itself. I had more time, better output, and less friction. But it also showed up in my personal life. AI helped me craft a meaningful Mother’s Day experience for my wife. It helped me design fasting strategies that improved my health. It helped me plan meals, fix problems around the house, troubleshoot parenting decisions, and make sense of information I would have spent hours researching. And when I had that extra time, I didn’t get pulled back into work unless I chose to. I could go to a dentist appointment in the middle of the day, take a long and unrushed lunch with a friend, or finish all my deliverables by Wednesday and decide whether to spend Thursday learning something new or simply catching my breath. The work didn’t collapse. The pressure didn’t increase. My life expanded.

It made me realize something I hadn’t fully acknowledged before. Modern work has taken something from us. In the Western world we gained comfort, convenience, and stability, but we traded away presence. We traded away time with our families. We traded away community. We traded away the easy, everyday closeness that shaped humanity for thousands of years. Most of us became so accustomed to structuring our identity around productivity that we stopped noticing how unnatural it is to live in a world where every hour has to justify itself. And the irony is that so many of us are exhausted not because the work is meaningful, but because we are fighting systems and tools that demand more than they give.

When people worry that AI will isolate us or diminish our value, I think they’re looking at the wrong thing. The real question isn’t whether AI replaces our tasks. The real question is whether it lets us reclaim the parts of life that work has been quietly stealing for decades. From my experience, it does exactly that. It allows us to think more clearly and act more quickly. It collapses the distance between idea and execution. It frees time. It reduces decision fatigue. It shifts the focus back to the human parts of the job: judgment, direction, taste, empathy, understanding, creativity. AI does not erase the human. It erases the busywork that kept the human buried.

This shift also forces a deeper look at identity. I have been through a real identity collapse before, not because of AI but because I lost my marriage and walked away from a prestigious creative leadership role at the same time. The life I had built around external markers vanished. I had to rebuild myself from the inside out. I learned the hard way that identity tied to relationships or roles is fragile, because those things can disappear without warning. When AI pressed on my professional identity, I recognized the feeling. It wasn’t the technology creating the crisis. It was the realization that I had tied too much of my worth to what I could do with my hands and my tools. Naming that truth stripped the fear of its power. I stopped focusing on what AI could take away and started focusing on what it made possible.

What became obvious is that AI shifts the center of value. It doesn’t eliminate craft, but it changes its role. Deep craft becomes something we do for expression, growth, grounding, and connection, in the same way pottery or cooking or woodworking or dance have always offered meaning even when only a small percentage of practitioners do them professionally. Craft becomes part of our humanity, not our job security. Direction becomes the scarce skill. Seeing the right problem becomes the scarce skill. Asking the right questions becomes the scarce skill. Perspective becomes the scarce skill. These are things AI cannot automate, because they come from lived experience, embodied understanding, emotional context, and the simple reality that humans move through the world in ways machines do not.

This is why I believe AI increases human agency rather than reducing it. But the increase is not automatic. It depends on how people choose to use the time they get back. Some will use it to work more. Some will use it to rest. Some will build businesses. Some will build community. The technology does not determine the outcome. People do. In the same way remote work reshaped expectations almost overnight, AI will reshape what people tolerate, what they accept, and what they choose. If an employer demands forty hours of desk time while another offers freedom and still gets excellent work, people will choose the freedom. Incentives will shift because people shift.

The most exciting part of this transformation is that it brings us closer to something the developed world has lost: the chance to live at a human pace. In a world where basic needs become easier to secure and where work becomes less about grinding through tasks and more about directing intelligent systems, we rediscover something older and deeper. We rediscover connection. We rediscover community. We rediscover creativity. We rediscover the part of ourselves that thrives on exploring, helping, teaching, making, and discovering. There is a saying that past generations struggled so that future generations could create. It feels like we are finally arriving at that moment. Not because AI will make everything effortless, but because it removes the friction that once consumed our time.

The first time AI feels threatening, it shakes your identity. The second time, and the third, and the tenth, something different happens. It reveals who you were underneath the craft. It reveals the part of you that can adapt, explore, guide, and connect. It reveals that the future of work is not about working more, but about being more. And if we let it, this technology might not push us further away from each other. It might bring us back to what has always mattered most: time, connection, and the chance to live a life that feels fully human.