I wasn't at Hubspot INBOUND 2025 earlier this week in person, but I was impatiently waiting for Hubspot CTO Dharmesh Shah’s keynote. I got a chance to hear it yesterday and his framing of AI as a collaborative partner, not a competitor, deeply resonated with me. He put it simply: don’t think about competing against AI. Think about competing with AI. The goal is not a zero-sum battle. The goal is to create a positive-sum collaboration. That framing hit me hard because I see how quickly the narrative is shifting to “AI will do my job.” The real opportunity is, “AI can help me do my job better, faster, smarter.”
Dharmesh reminded us that AI has no lived experience. It has never tried to fold a fitted sheet, negotiate with a toddler, or rebuild trust after a tough miss. It does not know the weight of silence in a room after a difficult decision. That is the human moat. AI can generate, automate, and even surprise us, but it cannot replicate lived experience, empathy, or conviction.
Take the post-sales world as an example. Customer success teams managing a large number of accounts often wake up each morning wondering which account to prioritize and where to spend time. On its own, that is overwhelming. But AI as a partner can help. Imagine combining human engagement signals, telemetry, and activation data into a health score by leveraging AI. Suddenly, teams know where to focus their energy. AI can also draft MBRs, QBRs, and activation plans for clients automatically. And that is when humans can step in to decide which conversations to lead, where to apply empathy, and how to build trust. This is not AI competing with customer success managers. It is AI helping them scale their impact. And examples like this exist across every function in our professional lives.
Here’s how I see it. I encourage my team to use AI. It is a powerful accelerator. But when you come to me, bring material that you can own. Bring your judgment, your context, and your understanding. Any material without your own thinking will always be weaker. The real value is what you bring- your intelligence, your emotional quotient, and your lived experience as a professional.
The leaders and teams who truly scale are the ones who use AI as leverage while still showing up fully human. AI can help generate, automate, and even surprise us, but it cannot replicate lived experience, empathy, or conviction.
So how do we make AI a real partner in our journey. Three things to focus on:
Use AI to accelerate, not to decide. Let AI take care of the heavy lifting, but keep the ownership of decisions and trade-offs with yourself.
Show your intelligence and EQ in the final outcome. Edit, adapt, and contextualize what AI produces so that it reflects your thinking.
Turn individual usage into team habits. Make AI part of workflows, measure the lift, and build confidence across the team.
The future is not AI replacing us. It is AI amplifying us. And the paradox is beautiful. The better AI gets, the more important it becomes to bring our human-ness to the table. When we do that, we do not just scale our businesses. We scale ourselves.