Amplifying Human Values in the Age of AI

Leaning In on AI

Recently, I have been doing more incremental training on Claude as a marketer. While I am learning to test and re-test if Claude’s AI approach can help me be more efficient in my workshop training and writing projects, I also learn that it takes quite a bit of time to train AI to think like me.

As I am going through my training, I pause from time to time to reflect on my philosophy about how we should integrate AI into our daily work and personal tasks.

I have always been a believer in keeping skills and superpowers that I own and not outsource them because they are non-negotiables – something that I continue to see as values that I bring to do my best work.

My values are my own experiences, struggles, intuition, perspectives, judgement, and stories that come to shape how I see things, hear things, learn things, feel things, analyze things, and connect with others.

Human Value Awakening

While I am trying to better at working together with AI to do great work, I have been reminded by an Instagram podcast clip of Seth Godin, who was being interviewed by Steven Bartlett of The Diary of A CEO, raised awareness for us to create values in human work.  Seth Godin is an American author, entrepreneur, and marketing expert known for changing how people think about modern marketing, leadership, and work. I have been following Godin because of interesting things he said that wake people up.

What Godin said in that interview clip woke me up; it landed with me because I think we all need to be more aware and conscious of our superpowers, what we are good at that comes easily, and what we love to do that we don’t want to have someone else do it for us.

This thinking is what has prompted me writing this blog. My intention is to help us start navigating what we want to own as humans, and what we can work with AI together to do our best work.

Here’s an early process that I’ve developed to help in continuing to explore our values as technology evolves over time, and hope it resonates with you:

I. Defining What You as a Human Want to Own

Ownership is about something that you choose to hold onto, take responsibility for, and get better at it – not something that you want to outsource or let AI do it for you.

Before you can blend human and AI strengths, you need clarity on what you’re not willing to hand off, regardless of how good the technology gets. This starts with naming the human values that define how you work.

Some of these are:

1. Human judgement under ambiguity: When the data is incomplete, the client is unclear about what they want, or the situation has no precedent, someone has to make a call. That would be you.
2. Human empathy built over time: Consistency, follow-through, and a willingness to be vulnerable with a client — these compound slowly, and they can’t be automated into existence.
3. Ethical accountability: When a campaign misfires or a strategy backfires, someone has to own it, explain it, and make it right. AI doesn’t carry that weight.
4. Human intuition in the room: The unspoken tension in a meeting, the hesitation in someone’s voice, the moment a client needs reassurance instead of another uncertainty — this is read-through emotion, not calculated from data.
5. Human perspectives shaped by lived experience: Your point of view is shaped by everything you’ve lived through. Human lived experiences bring texture that data alone can’t replicate.

Notice that none of these are about resisting technology. They’re about preserving and protecting the parts of you or your work that depend on human emotions and human perspectives in the first place — and being honest with yourself about they are.

II. Defining What AI is Good at and Can Own

Identifying tasks for AI to do is not about cutting corners. It’s about freeing up your time for the work that only you can do and love to do, because you’ll get energy from doing them.

For example, AI is exceptionally good at:

1. Pattern recognition across large data sets: spotting trends a person would need weeks to find manually.
2. Speed on first drafts and variations: giving you ten headline options in the time it takes to write one.
3. Consistency at scale: keeping tone, formatting, and compliance steady across hundreds of assets.
4. Research synthesis: pulling together sources and summarizing them quickly and clearly.
5. Removing repetitive admin: freeing up hours that used to go to formatting, scheduling, or basic reporting.

I have delegated AI to do some of the items above, especially items A and D, and I do the final checking to make sure the output makes sense to me and to my clients.

III. Blending Human Values and AI to Achieve Best Work

The idea here isn’t about choosing AI or choosing human efforts. It’s about knowing when human should lead and own and when AI can assist.

For examples:

1. Strategy and positioning: Human leads. AI can stress-test assumptions, but the direction has to come from you.
2. Drafting and variations: AI leads based on your prompts. Let it generate volume and options; you edit for voice, nuance, and fit.
3. Client relationship moments: Human only. Difficult conversations, negotiations, and moments of reassurance don’t belong to a machine.

Think of this process less like a handoff and more like a relay — you’re both running, just not the same leg of the race.

Sometimes it’s tempting to hand off the parts of your work that build long-term trust, simply because AI is now technically capable of doing them. Just because it *can* doesn’t mean it *should*.

Trust is built in the moments that feel small and are easy to automate away — the personal follow-up, the handwritten note, the extra five minutes on a call. Protect those deliberately.

It’s also worth checking your negotiables and non-negotiables regularly. What made sense to keep human-led six months ago might be a place where AI can now safely take more of the load — and vice versa. Treat the framework above as a living document, not a fixed plan.

IV. Creating and Amplifying Human Values to Grow Together with AI

Here’s a mindset that we need to continue to practice:  continue practicing your human; values that go unused don’t stay sharp. Like any skill, they need growth and repetitions — especially human judgement and human intuition, which can become rusty if we don’t continue to exercise and use those muscles. 

A few ways to keep building:

1. Practice human judgement calls on purpose: Before reaching for an AI draft, sit with the ambiguity for a few minutes first. Make the call yourself, then compare.
2. Seek feedback from real people: Not just engagement metrics. Metrics tell you what worked. People tell you why — and that “why” is rooted in human emotions.
3. Stay curious about the “why”: It’s easy to see that something resonated. It’s more valuable to understand what made it resonate, which usually traces back to human perspectives you hadn’t considered.
4. Mentor someone: Teaching a skill is one of the fastest ways to keep your skills and values fresh and sharpened.
5. Revisit your non-negotiables list regularly: As AI capabilities shift, what you choose to own might shift too. Don’t let that list go stale.

One thing that Seth Godin reminded us is that the “more human you can be, the harder you are to be replicated.”

Having a healthy mindset that embrace technology, knowing your superpowers and constraints will keep you at pace and stay relevant in this modern world.

V. Key Takeaways to Keep You Grounded as AI Evolves

Here’s is a quick recap:

1. Decide, deliberately, what human values you will never hand off — and revisit that decision often.
2. Recognize AI’s strengths and limitations, so you can focus fully on what you do best.
3. Sequence your work: let AI lead on speed and scale, and lead yourself with human intuition, judgement and empathy.
4. Treat human perspectives and human intuition as a premium, and continue to go out there to get experiences, build relationships, and gain perspectives that will make you more human.

Don’t let the fear that you will be left behind if you don’t adopt AI 100% in what you do. Keep yourself grounded because you know your capabilities and superpowers if you get to test drive and stress-test them. Only when you have gone through the struggles and experiences yourself that you will know what to change to make it better or more efficient by using technology.

You will then be a better teacher to your clients or AI-assisted tasks because you know what you are asking and what you are looking for in the output. This will make you feel more satisfying about using technology not for its sake, but for its ability to help you be even better at what you love to do.

Want a simple way to track what you’re choosing to own as AI evolves? click here to request a copy of your quarterly human non-negotiables checklist.

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