Perspective #01 The Theatre of Human Relevance

When relevance becomes performance, credibility turns into theatre — a quiet ritual that hides decline behind applause.

Everyone is talking about AI in the language of opportunity: speed, scale, efficiency, creativity, transformation. Much less attention goes to the human side of operational redundancy. People notice when parts of their work start losing value. They notice when tasks that once justified teams, status or fees can suddenly be done faster and more cheaply elsewhere. That recognition has consequences long before jobs formally disappear. It enters meetings, sales language, internal strategy decks and private anxiety.

What follows is often easy to observe. Organisations do not immediately say that part of their offer has become replaceable. They repackage it. They rename it. They surround it with words that imply depth, judgement, care or uniquely human value. The practical function of this language is usually straightforward: to preserve continuity while the underlying economics are shifting.

That is why whole sectors start producing a similar style of messaging at the same time. Consulting firms emphasise “human-centred transformation”. Recruiters talk about “empathy at scale”. Media organisations sell “human insight” as a distinguishing asset. The wording varies by industry, but the behavioural pattern is familiar. When the operational core of a service becomes easier to standardise or automate, the public narrative moves towards whatever still sounds irreplaceable.

This does not mean the human element is fictitious in every case. Some organisations do redesign their work in a serious way. They reduce what no longer adds value, build new capability, and define more clearly where human judgement actually matters. Those cases exist. They are usually recognisable because the change is visible in the work itself, not only in the branding around it.

The weaker response looks different. The service remains largely the same, but the description becomes more elaborate. More words are used to defend value than to create it. The organisation keeps the old structure, keeps the old margins in view, and keeps signalling distinctiveness after the basis of that distinctiveness has eroded. This is where performance begins to replace honesty.

You can already see the pattern in several fields. In recruitment, sourcing has been heavily automated and first-round screening is increasingly delegated to AI-assisted systems. In consulting, analytical output that once required large amounts of manual synthesis can now be produced far more quickly. In media, routine drafting, summarising and formatting are no longer secure sources of human advantage. In each case, the pressure is similar: the easier it becomes to commoditise the core task, the stronger the incentive to reframe the surrounding work as something more nuanced, bespoke or deeply human.

The problem is not adaptation. Adaptation is necessary. The problem begins when the organisation continues to perform uniqueness after its real basis has weakened, and when employees are expected to participate in that performance while privately recognising what is happening. That gap carries a psychological cost. People start managing appearances, defending shaky territory and speaking in borrowed certainty. They can feel the instability of their role long before anyone says it plainly.

Some organisations respond early and build something new. They simplify, specialise, or move towards work where judgment, trust and contextual understanding are genuinely harder to commoditise. Others spend that period protecting the story they have already told about themselves. That usually buys time, calms clients and maintains internal order. It does not solve the underlying problem.

Once that gap becomes widely visible, the language loses force. Clients hear the inflation. Employees hear it too. At that point the issue is no longer whether AI is impressive. The issue is whether an organisation can state clearly what still creates value, where human contribution remains substantively different, and what must be abandoned because the old justification no longer holds.

That is where the real test now sits. Not in the slogan, and not in the performance of relevance, but in whether the work has actually been rebuilt.

The bigger the bet, the bigger the lie.