Beyond my lifelong quest to prove Andrea Pennells wrong—my grade 11 English teacher, who once wrote in a report card, “Adam’s most unfortunate ski accident certainly contributed to the depression of his mark this term, but so also did his continuing lack of mastery of the basic skills of spelling, punctuation and sentence structure,” writing forces me to slow down. To organize thoughts that have been bouncing around my head for weeks. To make sense of experiences that, in the moment, felt disconnected but often reveal a common thread once they're committed to paper. 

It's cathartic. It's clarifying. I dare say: It's fun.

So, when we recently refreshed the banner on The Ampersand, we landed on those three simple words, less a tagline than a philosophy. They are, in many ways, an attempt to describe what I hope this newsletter has always been. Not industry news. Not marketing copy. Not a collection of productivity hacks, top 10 lists, or standard-issue self-help babble. Just one human thinking and trying to make sense of leadership, business, and life—and inviting others into the conversation.

There is, of course, a certain irony in writing this in the year 2026.

Artificial intelligence has exploded into every corner of professional life. Mine included. Before going further, let me say there are legitimate concerns about AI and the data centres that fuel it: they can consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, strain existing infrastructure and carry a significant environmental footprint. Those are absolutely problems to solve, though not necessarily reasons to opt out. Alberta’s approach—requiring major projects to bring their own power, pay their share of infrastructure costs and employ dramatically more efficient cooling technology—is an attempt to do exactly that. Oh, and spoiler alert for my October post, I’m referring to the province of Alberta, within the country of Canada. But I digress.

The broader concerns about AI are real, too: jobs, privacy, misinformation, bias, cybersecurity, concentrated power and, ultimately, questions of human control. 

But I don’t think the choice is binary; between embracing AI recklessly and rejecting it altogether. The challenge is to manage the risks while ensuring we aren't spectators to one of the most consequential technological transformations of our lifetime.

Every transformative technology creates legitimate disruption alongside enormous opportunity. The lesson of the Industrial Revolution and the Internet isn't that the skeptics were wrong; it's that societies ultimately learned to mitigate many of the harms without walking away from the technology itself. AI presents us with much the same challenge. The question isn't whether AI comes without consequences. It plainly doesn't. The question is whether we address those consequences while participating in the opportunity—or leave others to capture the opportunity while we inherit many of the consequences anyway.

Point is, I use AI every day.

It helps me summarize reports that once would have taken an hour to digest. It challenges my thinking. It brainstorms ideas I hadn't considered. It catches mistakes. It helps organize presentations, sharpen proposals, draft correspondence, and occasionally reminds me of something I should already know.

Sheepishly, it has made me better. More productive. More efficient. And I suspect the same is true for many of you.

The question, though, isn't whether AI is useful. It clearly is. The more interesting question is this: What shouldn't we delegate?

Every profession has pieces people can't wait to automate. The repetitive work. The tedious work. The administrative work. Wonderful. Automate all of it, if you can. Life's too short to spend it formatting spreadsheets or searching for the email attachment someone forgot to include.

But then there are the parts that are different.

The conversations that require empathy. The mentoring of a young colleague. The difficult phone call. The handwritten thank-you note. The speech you care enough to write yourself. The nuanced article that reflects not simply what you know, but who you are. The ability—as happens to me most days—to pitch for work, think on your feet and field questions you couldn't possibly have anticipated, in real time, with nowhere to hide, without the luxury of asking everyone to wait while you consult ChatGPT. And, perhaps most importantly, it is the wisdom to know the difference between knowing something and knowing what to do with it. As noted by the British humourist Miles Kington, knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing you’d never put one in a fruit salad. Those things matter precisely because they are human (a theme I spoke of here).

If we begin delegating to the machines the parts of our work that bring us joy, the parts that express our personality, the parts that differentiate us from our competitors—and increasingly, from the robots—what exactly are we left with? Efficiency? Productivity? Perhaps.

But also something a little emptier.

It is said that technology doesn't replace jobs; it changes them. I think that's true. But it also changes us. Every technological leap asks the same question:

"Now that you don't have to do this anymore...what will you choose to do instead?"

That's where I think many of us have a choice. We can use technology to eliminate drudgery, so we have more time for meaningful work. Or we can slowly eliminate meaningful work because technology happens to do it faster.

Those are very different futures.

In executive search, we spend a lot of time talking about differentiation. What makes this leader special? Why this candidate instead of another equally qualified one? What is the story only they can tell?

Ironically, those same questions increasingly apply to all of us.

The answers rarely live in our efficiency. They live in our humanity. Our curiosity. Our judgment, humour, and compassion. Our ability to connect seemingly unrelated ideas. Our willingness to tell a story.

Those are difficult things to automate. And I hope they always will be. Could artificial intelligence probably write The Ampersand every month? Almost certainly.

In fact, if you've made it this far, there's a decent chance AI helped improve parts of what you're reading right now. I don't see that as cheating. I see it the same way I see an editor, a trusted colleague, or a second set of eyes (multiple sets of which I rely upon before any post goes live). The ideas, however, remain mine. The stories remain mine. The perspective remains mine. The voice remains mine. And many of you have been reading this long enough that you’ll immediately recognize when it isn’t.

That's the part—the me part—I have no interest in giving away.

Not because machines can't write. But because I enjoy writing. Because I think. More accurately, because writing is how I think. I process. In some small way, writing helps me become a better leader than I was before I sat down at the keyboard. Work is hard enough. Most of us spend a significant portion of our lives doing it.

So here's a modest suggestion as we all navigate this remarkable new era. If you’ve reduced the amount of times you’ve seen a bank teller preferring instead an ATM or simply an e-transfer, then you’re ready. If you’ve used the Internet instead of your Encyclopedia Britannica, you’re ready. If you’ve tossed the VCR in favour of a streaming service, you’re ready. If you’ve consulted Google Maps instead of divorcing your spouse whilst unfolding an upside down paper one from the passenger seat, you’re ready.

Use AI. Embrace it. Learn it. Let it save you time. Let it eliminate frustration. 

Let it handle the work that never fed your soul in the first place.

But protect the parts that do.

Protect the conversations that only you can have, the ideas only you can develop, and the work that reminds you why you chose your profession in the first place.

The tools will continue to evolve. Astonishingly quickly. Our obligation is to ensure that our judgment, our curiosity, and our character evolve with them.

Which brings me back to the three words at the top of this page.

It isn't lost on me that the very edition in which I introduce Human. Thought. Leadership. is also the one in which I encourage you to embrace artificial intelligence. At first blush, that may seem contradictory but hopefully I’ve proven it shouldn’t be.

AI should make us faster. It should make us better prepared. It should free us from work that never deserved our time in the first place. But it should never replace the part that only we can contribute: our judgment, our curiosity, our empathy, our humour, our values, and our lived experience.

For me, that's this. A blank page. A blinking cursor. A cup of coffee. Or, depending on the time of day and severity of the writer's block, a wee dram. And the privilege of knowing that, once a month, a few thousand of my closest friends generously choose to spend a few minutes reading whatever happened to be on my mind.

For that, thank you.

My fellow humans, I missed you.

It's good to be back.

Regards,

Adam