The Six Habits Of High‑Performing AI Era Professionals

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Today’s job market feels like a jobless boom — productivity is rising, yet opportunities feel more fragile than ever. In this episode, Dr. Jon Finn explains why that’s happening and reveals how two very different species of AI are reshaping work.

Discover how agentic AI automates routine, low-value tasks — while generative AI acts as a powerful force multiplierfor human expertise. We unpack the snowmobile metaphor to show how professionals can accelerate performance by mastering the six habits that create genuine Human + AI advantage.

You’ll learn:

• How agentic AI automates low-value work
• Why generative AI amplifies expert impact
• The snowmobile metaphor for human-AI capability
• Why Brain State and habits determine ROI
• How top firms move beyond licences to results
• The Six Habits of High-Performing AI-Era Professionals

Chapters

• 1:25 Setting The Stakes: AI And Jobs
• 3:01 What’s Really Changing In Workplaces
• 4:52 Two Species: Agentic Vs Generative
• 6:09 Agentic AI In Action
• 7:48 Why Layoffs Target Low‑Value Tasks
• 11:18 Generative AI As Force Multiplier
• 13:43 The Snowmobile Metaphor Explained
• 16:13 Habits As The Missing Fuel
• 18:55 Six Habits And Next Steps

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:44

Hello, Habit Mechanics, Dr. John Finn here. I hope you're having a great week so far. We are excited to see so many people getting so many benefits from human AI performance psychology. But I know there's a bit of concern around because we're seeing more and more stories about people being displaced, people's jobs being displaced by AI, and it's real. We've been talking about this all year since reports like the World Economic Forum, uh Jobs for Future report came out, some of the big predictions from um banks like JP Morgan, etc. And what we're now starting to see is the workplace being disrupted, real uh roles that up until now have only ever been done by humans are being replaced or being they're being uh done by technology, this new species called AI. We've seen Amazon have laid off fourteen thousand people, umce are saying they've actually halved their workforce, and they've been pioneering many AI technologies for a number of years. Uh, we're seeing the stagnation in the job market. Um the the economic economists are talking about the jobless boom because uh businesses are making profits are up, but they're not hiring people, and this will not be going away, but it's not a doomsday scenario if you understand what's going on, because there are lots of things you can do about it. So I want to add a bit of clarity in this podcast. If you've been listening to other podcasts, hopefully you've already got some peace of mind. But I want to go a little bit deeper today and just talk about what are businesses actually doing, what roles are they actually replacing, and how can you use AI to accelerate your professional abilities so that you become irreplaceable at work, you become unstoppable, and you actually um are also empowered to thrive in your life more generally. So I believe AI is the biggest opportunity for human health, happiness, and performance that we've had in modern history. But I know it can be scary if you don't properly understand it. I speak to many people about AI every day, people who are sometimes called experts, people who are uh just wanting to learn more about things, and the biggest bugbearer of mine is that people just talk about AI as if it's one thing, it's not one thing, it's two core things neural network AI. One part of neural network AI, or one uh core product, if you like, is agentic AI, and you will already be using some agentic AIs in your workflows. The example that I like is Calendly, which is a calendar booking app. So instead of if someone wants to have a meeting with me or I want to have a meeting with them, instead of us going back and forth to try to agree a time, I can just send my then my calendarly link, or they can just send me their calendar booking link, and we can see each other's availability, we can pick a time that we want, put your details in, that that that time then automatically gets booked into our into our calendar, and then on the day of the the meeting, something pops up in my system, and I just press on the link and I can get into a Zoom call or a Teams call or whatever with that person. That's a good example, and I think agentic AI, think of it, it's like a self-driving car or like uh a robot taxi, and they they are coming as well. Um, and in fact, they are already here in some parts of the world, but um it's this technology neural network AI technology that can do repetitive tasks autonomously, and it's getting increasingly smart, and those um agents they can now start to work in teams. Um, so you get teams of agents working together. The other type, the other main species. So if you think of them as two core species, uh one is agentic, the the other core species is generative AI. That's things like Copilot and Chat GTP and Claude, and many businesses are now rolling out their own sector specific, or even the ones that they've built themselves. So one of our clients has built their own agenciai, it's cost them about 200 uh million dollars, uh, and they are not unique. And generative AI is not autonomous, it needs human input.

SPEAKER_00: 6:30

And the metaphor that I like to use is it's like a snowmobile and to get good utility from the generative AI, it needs a human to be working with it really well.

SPEAKER_01: 6:55

So I'm sure most people who are listening to this um podcast have used some form of generative AI, and you've used it to varying degrees. When you use it in your high-charge brain state where you're really motivated, and you're working with it in a subject you know a lot about, it it can double, treble, quadruple, and even more you. It's like um augmenting yourself so that literally in what you used to be able to achieve in a day, just working with your own, just using your own brain, that old-fashioned way of doing things, just working with your own brain, by working with the generative AI now, you can double, quadruple even more. I think I see that you can actually do you can 7x yourself if you get this right every day, but that can't happen if you're hungover or you've got brain fog or you're really tired, or you're working with it in a subject area that you're not an expert at. Um it's not magic, it's almost like uh a generalist expert consultant that knows more about most things than we ever will, but instead of having to pay a consultant exorbitant consultancy fees, then you pay your whatever it is subscription, twenty dollars a month or something, and every day you can, as a minimal, double, treble, quadruple your output, but it's not magic, you need your brain to be working well. Um I'm gonna come back onto the uh the generative AI in a second. What's happening in most businesses now is where the big gains are being made are with a genetic AI, where they are able to what what they are doing is when you hear these numbers of people being laid off or people being replaced or businesses just not hiring anymore, they are um automating many low value tasks, and I say low value tasks because they previously they were paying for those tasks to be done, um let me say that a different way. So previously, sort of the average wage those businesses were paying for that, um, those tasks to be to be done that are now being automated by Agente KI, it's not the highest wage in the business, probably not even the average wage in the business, it's towards the lower end of the wages in the business, and you know, many of the jobs that are being automated are the kind of jobs that we would have seen in the Western world being over being offshored, um, but now we can use the technology to do them instead, so that's what's happening, and actually it's been happening for quite a while. If you think about banking, they've used you remember neural network AI is not brand new, it's just newly available to most people. What we're seeing right now, it's like neural network AI's iPhone moment where everyone gets the technology in their hands. Big corporates have been using these powerful technologies for a long time. And if you think about banking, the way you do we do our own banking now, it's mainly done on a mobile app on your phone, and all those manual processes that you used to have to go into your high street bank to get done for you, they're now just done with a few clicks of a button because they have this essentially agentic AI running in the background. So, where most businesses are getting big success with AI is by outsourcing fairly um low-paid work, frankly. That's what's happening, and that's businesses' natural tendency is to say, okay, how can we use this type of technology to cut costs? And we've seen big breakthroughs in the last six months where uh businesses have proved there's massive utility, massive cost savings to be made by using this technology. Generative AI is a different story, but its potential is much bigger because generative AI can double, quadruple, and even more businesses' top performers, businesses the most expert employees, so instead of having to hire four more people at however much the top people are getting paid, you can get just one person to be doubling, quadrupling their output if they get good at generative AI at using it. And remember, this is the snowmobile, so agentic AI is like self-driving car or a robot taxi, it needs humans to set it up and get it going and to keep an eye on it, but it's fairly autonomous in what it's doing. Generative AI is more like an exchange, or you're having this exchange with the with the the technology, with the the species of generative AI. And in my snowmobile metaphor, think of it as the snowmobile is the generative AI. So you buy that, and many businesses now have invested in this that have invested in Copilot, uh, they've invested in Claude, Enterprise Licenses, Chat GTP, etc. They've built their own systems, so they've bought the snowmobile, but that doesn't give you the performance benefits that generative AI can deliver just by having the software or the hardware. The second thing you need is an instruction manual how to use it. This is a bit like the theory test. Um, so technically, what what how are you meant to actually use this thing, how you're meant to actually drive the snowmobile, what are the rules, what are the regulations. The technology is very intuitive, a bit like most people have never had um guidance to use a smartphone, didn't have to go to school to learn how to use a smartphone or do a degree or even do a course, you just learn it by using it. Generative eye is very similar, so you don't actually need all that much instruction, but you know, some sectors you need a bit more, so you have that technical training, that's the second element, but the third element, this is like the fuel that gets the thing going and keeps it on track in this highly volatile world that we live in, and that's why I like the snowmobile metaphor because it's like you're going up this mountain, the weather's stormy, you're going off track, the road isn't clear, you don't know what's coming up, you've got to be vigilant all the time, you've got to be in those high-charge brain states when you're you know riding the snowmobile, otherwise, it's not gonna go well. So the third component is the human, and it's the human or the the human habits that is the key, and this is the big thing that businesses are missing. They are missing the understanding that actually you can have the tech, you can give your people some technical training, but that is not going to get you big ROIs on the investments you've made in the technology. The big return on investments are going to come, are they gonna be driven by people's habits? And it's like the fuel for the for the snowmobile, and the habits that we need to thrive in the AI era and to get the most out of generative AI are different to what we've seen before, um, or the things that high performers have done previously have become more important. And the good news is we've figured out what the habits are, and we're calling these habits the six habits of high performing AI era professionals, and we've created training programs to make it super simple for people to learn these six core habits that will get there, get them brainstate intelligent and make it really easy for them to get the most out of the generative AI. So if you want to become AI proof, if you want to thrive in the AI era, the key is is to understand the six habits and to actually build them into your daily life, um, and that's the work we're doing. So I hope that that's made things a bit clearer for you. AI is not one thing, think of it as two species agentic and generative, and they're species because they're evolving all the time. Agentic AI is a bit like a self-driving car or a robot taxi. Yeah, you've got to set it up, but once you've set it up and got it going, it's gonna be fairly autonomous in what it does. Um, you've got to keep your eye on it now and again, and that's the thing that's really displacing humans. But the most, I think the biggest opportunity in uh in the the gener in the neural network AI for um human health, happiness, and performance is generative AI and also for business's bottom lines return on investments. Remember, businesses have a fiduciary responsibility to make money for their shareholders, so they are legally bound to prioritize making um being as efficient and effective as possible. And I and what I see is that if you get good at driving that snowmobile, and again, it's not about just having the snowmobile, it's not about having the technical knowledge like your theory test, it's actually about having the six core habits, the six habits of high-performing uh AI era professionals. Um, and they're gonna be the foundations of thriving in the AI era. So you'll hear me talking more about those things. That's what we're gonna uh all the coaching that we're doing, all the training that we're doing, we're gonna make those the centrepiece. So we have already have programs available if it's of interest. You want to learn more about those six habits of high performing AI era professionals. Hope that's got you thinking. And if you just build one of those habits, you're gonna be in a much better position than you are right now. And that's why we always say you're only ever one brain state habit away.