Over the last few years I’ve watched law firms and other businesses scramble to respond to the Generative AI revolution. The energy is palpable, but so is the anxiety. The conversations are all too often just tactical: “What is our AI use policy?”, “Which tools should we license?”, “How do we stop data leakage?”.

These questions are necessary, but they fall too short.

This tactical, tool-based view of AI is too short-sighted. It’s like preparing for a new century by focusing only on the new hardware – the telephone, the car – without considering the profound, lasting shifts they will cause to our economy, our culture, and the very structure of our cities and societies.

As I argue in my new book, A Short Walk in AI, the real, lasting impact – the part we urgently need to prepare for – is not the tools themselves. It is the consequences.

For the business and legal communities, this is not an exercise: the AI revolution is challenging our core assumptions about ethics, economics, and law. We have a short, critical window to plan for the “bumpy ride” ahead, and to do that, we must look beyond the technology.

From Jobs to Tasks: The Great Unbundling is Here

One of the most significant strategic shifts that leaders need to grasp is “The Great Unbundling”.

We tend to think of AI in binary terms: “Will an AI replace a lawyer?” or “Will AI take an accountant’s job?”. This is the wrong framing.

AI will not necessarily replace the lawyer (at least in the near term…), but it will unbundle the lawyer’s job into its component tasks. A role that was once a single, complex monolith – comprising research, drafting, client counsel, and strategic judgment – will be broken apart: the AI will automate, accelerate, or perfect the routine cognitive tasks (the research, the first draft, the summarising).

This changes everything.

It forces us to stop thinking about job roles and start thinking about skills and tasks. The value proposition of your most expensive human talent is about to shift dramatically. When the machine can handle the “what” – the world of information, retrieval, and generation – the human’s value becomes the “so what?” – the world of judgment, strategy, and wisdom.

This unbundling is the force that will drive the next era of competition. The firms and businesses that win will be those that harness this new human-AI partnership, re-focusing their staff on the skills the technology cannot yet replicate: judgment, creativity, strategic synthesis, and empathy.

Your Strategy: From Tactical Response to Human-Centric Preparedness

When you look at AI through this wider lens, your immediate priorities as a leader change. Tactical manoeuvres give way to three deeper strategic questions:

1. The Talent Question: If routine tasks are automated, what is the new career ladder? How does a junior associate become a senior partner if the very tasks that once trained them are now done by AI? This has profound implications for your training, development, and mentorship models.
2. The Retention Question: Your best people don’t want to be “prompt engineers.” They want to solve complex problems. A winning retention strategy will involve redesigning workflows to ensure your human talent is augmented, not just automated – freeing them to do the high-value work that they (and your clients) value most.
3. The Competitiveness Question: Firms that successfully unbundle and re-bundle their workflows will operate at a speed, cost, and quality level that is simply unattainable by those who don’t. This isn’t just an efficiency gain; it’s an existential threat to old business models.

Looking at the Further Horizon

This is not a one-time change. This unbundling is the first step toward a much larger workforce transformation and business and law firm leaders need a dual-horizon strategy:

• On the near horizon (today – 3 years): Focus on immediate, measured steps. Redefine roles. Invest heavily in retraining your existing workforce in critical thinking and strategic counsel. Build new development paths to minimise the upheaval and stay competitive.
• On the far horizon (5 – 10 years): Begin planning for the wider societal and cultural implications. Widespread automation will challenge our social contract. As a business leader, what is your role in a “post-labour” economy? What new kinds of value will your firm – and your people – create?

These are not easy questions, but they are the right questions. The “bumpy ride” I mention in my book’s preface is inevitable, but the firms that start asking these strategic questions today are the ones that will be able to navigate it.

This is the core of the work I do: moving beyond the tactical to help leadership teams understand the wider perspective, prepare their teams for the “great unbundling,” and build a robust, forward-looking AI strategy.

If you’re a leader who is ready to step back and look at the further horizon, I invite you to get in touch here. Let’s start the strategic conversation.