The 46-Hour AI Experiment That Exposed a Bigger Problem for Business

AI is changing the labor market quickly. PwC’s 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, based on more than one billion job adverts across 27 countries and territories, found that roles requiring AI skills grew by 69%, compared with 9% across the wider jobs market. Workers with AI skills also earned an average wage premium of 62%.

There is unease alongside that growth. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found that 18% of US employees believed AI or automation could eliminate their job within five years. Among workers at organizations already using AI, the figure rose to 23%.

Jim Harris has spent much of his work looking at what happens next for businesses. The AI and disruptive innovation expert argues that companies will get more from the technology if they rethink how work is done, rather than adding AI to processes designed years earlier.

In this exclusive interview with the AI Speakers Agency, Harris explains how businesses can introduce AI without fueling resistance, why human oversight still matters, and where companies risk leaving much of AI’s value on the table.

Question 1. How can companies build employee confidence around AI adoption, particularly when job security is a concern?

Jim Harris: “First off, it's important to create psychological safety. The majority of people in developed nations actually fear AI. They fear job loss. As adults, we tend to fear things or are uncomfortable with new ways of working.

“And so an organization has to work really hard to say, "Your jobs are safe, number one, and number two, we're going to provide you training. And three, this is going to enhance your skill set and your employability."

“So those are a few things organizations have to do.”

Question 2. Why should companies rethink entire workflows rather than simply add AI to processes they already use?

Jim Harris: “I was at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago, and I interviewed the head of AI for Ernst & Young in the US. EY has 400,000 employees and they've spent a billion dollars on AI.

“They had a 46-hour risk management process that they'd historically run for their clients and they thought, "Okay, let's apply some AI to it."

“With the people who designed the process, they got it down to 32 hours, which is a 20% gain, which is great.

“But then they said, "Let's try something different. Let's take people who've got no experience with the process, but who are technology-first, AI-first, chomping at the bit, new individuals in our organization, and pair them with risk managers who've never been involved in this process."

“They got the process down to 15 minutes.

“Then they said, "Well, we're EY, we have to have data compliance and we have to verify everything." So they added some steps back in and got it back to six hours.

“Look at this: 46 hours, 32 hours, 15 minutes, then back to six. It highlights a couple things for me.

“Number one, you can't just sprinkle some AI fairy dust on your existing processes and hope to get the greatest gain.

“You really need to start with a blank sheet of paper and say, if we were designing this process today from first principles, what would we do? In other words, we're not going to take a 2018 or before process and try and enhance it with AI. How do we redesign it?

“Secondly, the people who have been involved in designing the process, unconsciously or consciously, are wedded to it. We need to have fresh eyes to bring in.

“When you actually look at 46 hours down to six hours, that's a more than 80% reduction. That is staggering. And now you can redeploy people for more important activities.”

Question 3. Which real-world example best captures the scale of what AI can achieve beyond generative tools such as ChatGPT?

Jim Harris: “There's so many, but I've had the pleasure, I'm a journalist, of being in interview sessions with Demis Hassabis, who's the founder of Google DeepMind, and he won the Nobel Prize in 24.

“Why? PhD students used to spend an entire five-year career to map the exact structure of a single protein in the human body. AlphaFold did that work in two seconds.

“And so AlphaFold mapped all 200 million proteins in human and animal life on this planet. Now, why is that important?

“Would it be important to know what protein goes rogue and starts cancer at stage zero? Would that be worthwhile to know? Yes. No. Maybe.

“When you do the math on this example, five years of a PhD student's time to two seconds is a billionfold increase in productivity, which is why Demis won the Nobel in 24. It was announced in 25.

“Now Demis is talking about ending some major diseases within a decade because the same AI is being applied to pharmacological products that can intervene and bind to just one part of a protein and stop cancer before it becomes an issue. In other words, stop it at stage zero.

“The reason you only want to bind to one place on the protein is if you bind to two places, or if you bind to three places, you get two side effects.

“This is critical for humanity. So many people think AI is ChatGPT, and it is, but that is so 2022. Really, there's more than 100,000 AI applications for business today.”

Question 4. As AI becomes embedded in everyday work, where should leaders draw the line between automation and human oversight?

Jim Harris: “I treat AI like a super-bright intern. I would not have her write my new book, but she can do research.

“The answer she gives me can be somewhere between 50 and 80% of the way to the final answer of what I'm looking for. So you always have to have a human in the loop.

“AI is a tool. It doesn't replace humanity.

“It's not an either/or, it's an and. Back to the first question about creating psychological safety for people, you need to train every single person in AI so that they understand it and what are the guard rails?”

Question 5. How do you tailor your talks so that the material reflects the specific challenges facing each audience?

Jim Harris: “For each audience it's different. I spend an hour with the meeting planner and the key decision makers for that meeting in terms of what they want to achieve.

“We typically do an hour-long Zoom or Teams meeting. Then I'll ask for the names of a dozen people who represent a broad cross-section of the audience: different geographies, different lengths of time with the organization, different ages, different responsibilities.

“And I interview them, not for an hour, but for 20 minutes. Based on those dozen interviews and the hour-long objective-setting session, I create a custom engagement for that client.

“It's different for every client. But the greatest praise I feel I can get is when somebody comes up to me afterwards and says, "How long have you been working in commercial real estate?"

“Because the terminology, the examples, are all so hyper-customized.”

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This exclusive interview with Jim Harris was conducted by Tabish Ali of the Motivational Speakers Agency.