What if AI does not replace you, but makes your ideal working day possible?

We talk a lot about what AI is going to take over from us. Jobs, tasks, administration, analyses, planning. Perhaps even part of our thinking.

But I actually find another question far more interesting: what do we get back for it?

Just imagine that AI is not something you have to protect yourself against, but something that helps you to let go of more and more work that you do not really want to do at all. The administration, the endless emails, recurring analyses, lists, standard reports and meetings in which we mainly exchange information that an AI agent could have collected and summarised long ago.

Suppose we could let go of all that, step by step.

How would you then shape your working day?

We are allowed to dream a bit more

As an AI Evangelist I regularly visit organisations to take people through what is coming our way technologically. I talk about AI, skills, matching, agents and the future of work.

But I notice more and more often that another part of my work is at least as important: helping people to long for that future.

Because we often organise change from pain and urgency. We have too few people. Productivity has to go up. Costs are too high. The labour market is stuck. We have to digitalise. We have to do something with AI. People have to develop and change.

And sometimes all of that is true. Sometimes you simply have to name honestly what is no longer working.

But pain is not the only way to get moving.

You can also entice people. By imagining together a future you would like to move towards. A future in which work does not only become faster and more efficient, but in which technology gives us room to become more human instead.

I believe more and more that longing has enormous power to change things. If you can really feel how you would like to work and live, other choices suddenly become far more logical.

What does my ideal working day look like?

So let me do that exercise on myself.

I wake up relaxed. My day does not start with an inbox that determines what is expected of me. First I take time to move, to be quiet and to come into my body. To feel for a moment how I am actually doing before I decide what I want to give my attention to.

After that I mainly want to meet people who give me energy. Not because there happens to be a sixty minute meeting in my diary, but because we want to discover, make or change something together.

I want to have good conversations. Bring together people who do not yet know each other. Help someone who is stuck somewhere and get energy from that myself as well. Make an unexpected connection. Come up with an idea together that suddenly makes a problem that seemed complicated for years far simpler.

And I want to have room. To go outside. To move. To eat. To laugh. To think. Sometimes to do absolutely nothing for a while.

Because perhaps that is exactly where the best idea of the day comes from.

I no longer want to judge myself on how hard or how much I have worked. One good idea can have more value than a whole week of being busy. One conversation in which you really touch someone can be more important than twenty Teams calls. One good connection can set something in motion that a hundred PowerPoints cannot achieve.

For me that is not laziness. That may well be a far more intelligent way of working.

What if every day is allowed to contain a bit of holiday?

In my ideal future I would even want to make less and less distinction between a working day, a weekend day and a holiday.

Not because I always want to work. Quite the opposite.

But because as far as I am concerned work and life may run through each other much more. Every day may contain relaxation, connection, creativity and moments in which you do something meaningful for someone else. And also time in which nothing at all has to happen.

Of course there will always be less enjoyable things that have to be done.

But why would we keep doing those ourselves if technology can take them over better and better?

Make yourself a little redundant

That brings me to a thought I find increasingly appealing: what if every day you try to make a small part of your own work redundant?

I understand that this can sound threatening. We have learned to take security from our job, our expertise and from the fact that others need us.

But to me it increasingly starts to sound like freedom.

If AI can do something today that still cost me time yesterday, room is created to learn, create or contribute something new tomorrow.

It only becomes really threatening if we believe that our value equals our current tasks.

But surely you are not your administration? You are not your CRM, your weekly report or the meeting you organise every Tuesday. And in the end you are not your job description either.

As far as I am concerned the more interesting question is: where can you be of value if part of what you do today is no longer needed tomorrow?

We are incredibly busy keeping problems going

If you look honestly at many organisations, you see enormous numbers of people working very hard.

But working hard and working meaningfully are not the same thing.

A large part of our time goes into answering questions, searching for information, repairing processes, correcting mistakes, making reports and putting out fires. And a month later there are new reports, new escalations and new fires.

Not because people are not doing their job well. On the contrary.

But because we have built organisations in which a great deal of human energy is needed to process the complexity of that same organisation.

And it is exactly there that I see an enormous opportunity for AI.

Let AI collect information, recognise patterns, monitor processes, prepare proposals and take over part of the repetitive thinking work.

Then perhaps we can finally ask the question a bit more often: why does that fire actually break out again every single time?

Perhaps we can then stop only working harder inside the system and finally make time to change the system itself.

If thinking becomes abundant, what then becomes valuable?

I find that one of the most fascinating developments of this moment.

A large part of knowledge work consists of finding, structuring, analysing, formulating and combining information. And that is exactly where AI is getting better at an incredible speed.

AI can come up with dozens of scenarios where we might come up with three. It can find connections that we miss, contradict us and put forward perspectives we had not thought of ourselves.

That does not have to make human thinking less important.

Perhaps it actually helps us to break free from the endless repetition of our own patterns of thought.

And perhaps something else becomes more important as a result: being able to feel what matters. Giving meaning. Making choices. Creating trust. Really seeing someone. Connecting people. Playing, imagining, creating and taking responsibility for what we want to do with all that intelligence.

Technology can help us better and better to work out how exactly something can be done. The question of what we actually want remains ours.

So: what does your ideal working day look like?

And by that I do not mean your current working day with Copilot added. Nor eight hours of work of which AI automates two for you.

Dream bigger.

Suppose technology could take over a large part of the work that costs you energy. That you get more freedom to choose who you work with, when you work and what you work on.

What would you do then?

Who would you want to spend more time with? Which problem would you really want to solve? What would you want to make or create? What would you want to outsource to AI straight away?

And perhaps even more interesting: which part of your work would you never want to outsource to AI?

I suspect there is something important there.

Try asking your team that question too

I think this can be a far more interesting start to an AI transformation than yet another roadmap.

Do not only ask: how can we implement AI? Try asking: how do we actually want working here to feel in five years?

Let people describe their ideal working day. Ask which work they would most like to get rid of, which work they would like to do much more of and which contribution they would want to make if time and capacity became far less limiting.

Then put those pictures side by side.

Perhaps it turns out that almost nobody longs for more meetings or reports. Perhaps people want more time for customers, colleagues, craftsmanship, creativity and solving real problems.

Then the next question suddenly becomes very concrete: what do we have to organise differently today to make that future possible?

At that moment AI is no longer a technology project. It becomes a means with which we can redesign work.

I would rather long than fear

I do not know exactly what the future of work looks like. Nobody knows that.

But I do know from which starting point I would rather shape it. Not from fear, protecting our current jobs and tasks at all costs, but from curiosity about what becomes possible when technology can take over more and more of the work that occupies us now.

Perhaps we do not only have to be afraid that AI will take over our work. Perhaps we may also hope that AI takes over a great deal of our work.

So that we get room to do something new again. To be more meaningful. To do work that gives us energy and with which we add something that would not have existed without us.

Not just more efficient. But freer, more creative, more connected and perhaps even a little happier.

So ask yourself one question: if you wake up tomorrow and AI has taken over all the work you actually wanted to be rid of, what does your ideal day look like?

Start by dreaming

Do you want not only to think about this, but really to get going with it? With yourself, your team, your organisation or your network?

Then do not start with an AI strategy, roadmap or implementation plan. Start by dreaming together about how you would like to work if much of what occupies you today is no longer necessary.

That is also what I like to do with organisations: show what AI makes possible and then explore together what that means for people, work and the way we shape organisations.

Because I think real movement does not start with the plan. AI can make that plan for us better and better. We have to choose the direction ourselves.

And for that we first have to dare to dream.