The Habit Mechanic — Train Your Brain for the AI Revolution

Why AI Is Replacing Humans Faster Than Anyone Predicted

• Dr. Jon Finn

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In this episode of the Habit Mechanic Podcast, Dr. Jon Finn is joined by Tougher Minds’ Head of Coaching, Andrew Foster, to unpack what’s emerging from Davos 2026 — and what it means for work, jobs, and human performance in the AI era.

Using a headline claim that AI is impacting labour “like a tsunami” as a starting point, they explore why the pace of AI investment and adoption is accelerating faster than many predictions, and why this is already changing what organisations expect from humans at work.

They also discuss real-world examples of cognitive work being automated or radically accelerated, what this means for people whose roles contain repetitive, procedural tasks, and why the answer isn’t fear — it’s becoming more Brain State intelligent and learning to do the high-charge, high-impact thinking AI can’t reliably replace.

The conversation also covers a crucial theme: AI can be a powerful tool, but humans remain responsible for accuracy, judgement, and outcomes — including the need to fact-check and build reliable systems for using AI well.

The episode closes with a simple reflective prompt to help you take one practical step in the next 24 hours toward using AI (and your Brain States) more deliberately.

SPEAKER_00:

Hello, Habit Mechanics. It's Dr. John Finn here, and in this episode, I'm also joined by our head of coaching, Andrew Foster. Today we're going to talk about some of the things that are going on at Davos uh 2026. This is where lots of the most influential people in the world get together and they talk about, amongst other things, the economy. And in fact, Davos 2025 was quite significant in starting to understand the impact that AI was going to be having last year and lots of predictions about what would happen in the next five years. What we've already seen kind of 12 months on from Davos 2025 and reports like Job for the Future, um, Jobs for the Future, World Economic Forum report is that many of those predictions about what would be happening in five years' time are already have already been exceeded, in particular around the amount of investment that um has gone into AI. And I think the the figure was back then being predicted that in by about 2030 there'd be about five trillion of investment into AI, and depending on which figures you look at, that may have already been surpassed 12 months after it was predicted. So within one within 12 months, the investment levels that were predicted for five years have already been reached. So we're gonna zoom into this article or use this an article that we found to get going, and the headline of the article we're talking about this because it impacts our ability to be at our best ultimately. Um that's why we wrote Train Your Brain for the Air Revolution. The title of the article is AI impacting labor like a tsunami as layoff fears mount. Andrew, our head of educ our head of coaching and education, over to you. What did you make of the article?

SPEAKER_01:

I thought it was really striking. I I think the use of that word tsunami. Um, so you see it in the headline, and I I appreciate why some people are sometimes sceptical, version on cynical, when people are talking about big change, they're wanting to know, well, who is saying that? Um, what what's in it for them? Uh that word tsunami yeah was was used by Christalina uh Gorgieva, who's who's MD of the uh IMF. Uh she's previously former CEO of the World Bank. And so that's a person who pretty serious person, right? Well, yeah, absolutely. There's actual you know, if if if we live in a uh uh an environment where people are always sounding off about all sorts of things, um whether it's it's what their football team should be doing, or or some politician or whatever else, and um in those circumstances what you say is quite disposable. This isn't that sort of person. This is this is someone with uh a reputation that she's she's built over her career and now in a incredibly prominent position, and making these comments at Davos, which is um you know the leader in it in its field, um as as an event for for influential people in in all aspects of the world economy. So for her to make that um make that statement, I think it's a pretty heavy data point in in favour of people needing to take action, pay attention and take action when it comes to how AI is going to affect them.

SPEAKER_00:

So these senior leaders, including um the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, they see AI as a major factor for economic growth. And I think it's helpful just to go back to the basics of what is neural network AI, and you know, I had my um not conversion moment, but the start of my conversion moment to the power of this technology in the London Science Museum, which is um just opposite the road from the Natural History Museum, which is kind of seeded by uh Darwin's work. And I feel that um AI is gonna be just as neural network AI will just be as as influential as as Darwin's uh theories, and essentially what we've what we've got is a technology that for the first time ever can execute cognitive tasks that up until this point in history only humans have been ever able to do before. So if it's something that a human can learn how to do, a cognitive task, something that you use your brain to do, uh a task you use your brain to execute, um neural network AI can learn how to do it. And one of the areas, and it's it's cited in this article, one of the sort of pioneering fields of the use of neural network AI has been sales and marketing. And one of the biggest sales and marketing companies in the world is called Salesforce. Uh in the city of London, you have Salesforce Tower, like a huge, massive skyscraper. Um is their I don't know if it's their global headquarters or just their UK headquarters, they have they're not just talking about the power of AI, they have actually reduced their workforce by 4,000 people. That is, they've halved their workforce in the last 18 months or so. And instead of paying humans to do sales and marketing activity like writing copy, reaching out to communicate with people, to sell them things, they've created what they call their agent force. And these are agents that can basically act like humans. One of the things I've just started to notice in the last few weeks is advertisements for uh a technology company called Eleven Labs. Eleven Labs are seen as sort of the pre the premium voice cloning technology, but they also have let's call them chatbots that speak to you like a human does. And the technology is amazing. And what surprised me is how quickly they've got into the mainstream because instead of companies paying a human being to answer the phone and to help people with their queries, or paying a human being to phone people up and to try to get them interested in their products, they can now get an AI agent to do that, and it's happening, and you may have already spoken to one. So this technology, much like in the industrial revolution, where we started to create technology that could replace physical human labour, we've now got technology for the first time ever that can replace human cognitive labour. So in the UK, we have a massive service sector industry where people are paid for their brain power really to think and solve problems. AI can now do huge swathes of that work. Um that's going to affect people's livelihoods. It's creating overwhelm and anxiety. Um, and I think what really is going on at Davos with and what we're seeing with this article and with these kind of announcements that, for example, that's in the article saying that um hedge funds and big investors are not investing in businesses anymore unless they have have a serious AI plan, that they're seriously thinking about how to integrate AI and these types of efficiencies into their business models, they're not going to invest in those businesses. So I think what the Davos piece really is doing is just doubling down saying this is not made up, it it's not hype, it's absolutely real. And I know that you sent me, you shared with me a story, an article that you come across just before Christmas, Andrew, about a barrister, very senior barrister, working in London, working in the high courts. I think it'd be useful for you to share that um insight with us.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, my it was coming to mind as you were talking. I was thinking about how it's a common phrase, isn't it? Oh, I was just going through the motions, and as you were talking about, well, in the Industrial Revolution, um physical labour was replaced, and what we're seeing now is cognitive labour that is that that has a pattern to it being being replaced, that that people have to, you know, this it's no sin to have got yourself uh a job, a position, and then you know, people have lives outside of that, and to be in in in a groove, you know, sort of getting in the groove is positive. Uh getting into a rut is seen as a negative. What we are going to see, and what the you know, the the barrister in the article that you referred to, which was in the spectator in their in their Christmas issue, what that barrister was recognizing is that there is a lot of work done by people who who would previously have seen themselves as irreplaceable. Um there's a lot of their tasks that actually are quite repetitive, aren't requiring that human element of genius, uh, aren't requiring necessarily what we would talk about as high charge brainwork. And so those if if that's the bulk of what you do, then those those tasks are going to be uh just going to be uh done more efficiently um and more economically by the new technology. And then the challenge is, you know, that that article, you know, spectator is written to to entertain as well as to inform. I think that article was written in a um you know quite a provocative and thought-provoking manner. But there is a serious truth behind it.

SPEAKER_00:

If people what's the what was the crux, Andrew?

SPEAKER_01:

So in terms of the I mean in terms of that article, you're saying that actually people who people who thought they had a job in the law till they retired, that's going. That's gone. You know, there's people gonna be literally um collecting their possessions in a box and going and find finding another um going having to go and find themselves something else to do.

SPEAKER_00:

But the moment of belief, uh if I get if I recall this correctly, yeah, he'd I think he may have heard that or more more people in the legal sector were starting to use AI, so they thought we need to have a look at this. So what he'd done is this is a a seriously senior barrister. Um he'd taken a case that he'd already defended and so this had already happened, the case had played out. So he got um I can't remember what it was, I think it may have been Groc, which I've never used. And he'd fed in the notes and the case details just as he just as he had got them initially, and he'd asked it to create a defence and he said that in minutes this system created not only a defence that was significantly better than the one that had taken him four days to create, he said it's one of the most comprehensive defences he's ever seen. And essentially he's saying, why would someone pay me to do this for four days at exorbitant rates when they can just get uh a technology to do it for pennies, if not for free? Yeah, that's a really good sort of microscopic insight into what we mean here. So and your point about repetition is the kicker. We are designed to repeat because most of what we're doing most of the time is automatic or semi-automatic, and it's you think, well, no, Barris is not doing that, of course they are. They learn the law, the law's complex, it has lots of loopholes, lots of nuances, but they've learned those things over a long period of time and via application, but often what they're learning is documented, it's now on the internet somewhere, or it can be uploaded, and most of the information they're uh processing, they're they're they're uh consuming, and then the solutions they come up with are procedural. There may be the odd moment every now and again that only they can come up with because they're in the moment and they know the context really well, but most of it is automatic or semi-automatic. It's like when you see um someone give a brilliant stand-up routine, or someone do this brilliant live show, or you watch a football team like Man City or League United under Bielsa, and you go, these guys are amazing, and they're off the cuff. They're not, they're just drilled into habits, and they know it so well, it looks fluid, but they're just doing these same repetitive things, they've just you know they've learned them so so well. So that's the whole point of the habit mechanic. The whole point of our approach is most of what we're doing most of the time is automatic, so it can be learned by technology.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely, and I think that that is the um you know that's the hopeful element of what we're well or what we're saying. The author of that article that we're talking about, the barrister, still has lots to contribute. The fact that um now that work can be done by the AI tools potentially frees him up from that four days. So just taking that in microcosm, that four days is freed up for him to use his experience to to use his um his human input to work with the AI and to to identify problems and to to um serve whatever purposes is his clients need quicker and better than uh he or or she has ever been able to do before.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, however, someone's still gonna pay him to do that. So there is a but that's real. So this is this is the economic reality. We're moving into a world where the habits that we used to use to get paid, let's just get straight to it, to get the money in our pocket so we can pay the mortgage, we can buy food, we can do all the things that we need money for. The habits that used to help us get paid are not gonna be are not gonna be the same habits that for many, many jobs allow us to get the same levels of compensation now in the AI era. Because what we're gonna need is the habits that allow us to get much better at managing our brain state sense, brain state intelligence. And one thing that I've just pulled up on my screen here, it's called one of my American associates uh passed this on to me, it's called Harvard AI, and it's it's called it's a domain specific AI for law firms, professional service providers and Fortune 500s. So essentially, what the you know, like the loom in the industrial revolution, um, replaced, you know, 10 workers or whatever, then 100 workers and scaled up like that, that's what that's what Neural Network AI is gonna do. Instead of paying loads of barristers to think for you, loads of very expensive barristers to think and solve the problem, you're gonna be able to solve the same kind of problems to the same kind of levels by paying um neural network AI pennies. And the way that I think about these data centers, and again, people go, yeah, but data centers are bad. It doesn't matter if they're good or they're bad. If businesses think they can make money out of these things and cheapen their costs, they will they will invest in them. The data centers we're seeing being built, for me, they're just like big brains, they're just brain power, that's what they are. But instead of humans generating the brain power, it's these uh AI models, and you know, we we run on electricity, that's what our brains run on, chemicals and electricity. Um, that's why these uh data centers take so much power because literally they're they're kind of working like human brains are, which are uh very energy intense. So there's another example, and it's also lore, isn't it? Where uh one of your clients, Andrew, where I'm talking about Eva, who is an American attorney. So she didn't uh lose her job, right? But she was able to probably do the output of about 10 people, and therefore she got a massive uh well, she got a new job where she got a massive pay rise, she got offered equity in the business. Last time I heard she was sitting a bar exam in California because she's an attorney, uh New York based attorney. So that's an example of someone understanding their brain states, getting their brain states sorted out, and then using the neural network AI technology to massively accelerate what they're able to do in every day, every week, every month, and get massive benefits for them.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it was remarkable. It was it's fantastic working with with people and seeing them take uh take tough minds principles, tough minds tools, and use them to deliver real-world effects for themselves. There's professional success there, also personal success, being able to um be more present at home, but not having to compromise on those big professional goals that um Eva had for herself and actually exceeding them and um being able to set new and even more ambitious and exciting um challenges for herself and and and going after them. It's it's it's it's really inspiring to see.

SPEAKER_00:

But if we dissect that, the the mechanism for Eva's success, and also the mechanism that was stopping her being successful, was her brain, like all of us, because brain power is limited, it's a limited resource, and it's more limited when we're overwhelmed, we're overstressed, because life is overwhelming and we find it hard to sleep, like we need to do all the things that get our brain working really well, um, to do the things that allow us to get into high-charge brain stuff. So Eva was one of our first clients where we saw this sort of it's like, as my friends would say, double bubble effect, which is um they use that expression when they're getting overtime or they're getting paid to get overtime basically twice as much as they normally would, because maybe they're working at the weekend or something. So Eva was able to get all the great effects from the tougher minds have a mechanic approach of getting a brain state working really well, but then by understanding AI, neural network AI, and understanding which tasks she could outsource to the AI, which tasks that she could uh augment with the AI, and she was able to go even further and faster than we've ever seen. And this is why we're likening neural network AI to sport science, but for brain power. And we've all well, if we've got any interest in professional sport whatsoever, then we will have seen the transformation of what athletes are able to do over the last 20 years, and that's because they've used um what I call first principle insights from physiology to train better, to train smarter, to train more efficiently and effectively, and therefore they're able to run faster, um, jump higher, etc. And that's what AI helps us to do from a cognitive performance perspective. So that's why we're so excited about it. It is gonna it is putting some people out of work. That is real, that's not scaremongering, the data's there, and I think looking at a pure example like Salesforce is really strong because they've been very proactive in talking about AI and embedding it into their systems. I'm pretty sure when they say, look, we've displaced these human roles and we've replaced them with AI, then I think that's absolutely real because you hear about AI sort of washing where people are saying we're laying these people off for AI, but then say, Well, you're just wanting to reduce your workforce. Um, and but for but for most people, AI isn't gonna replace your role, but what it is gonna change is the expectation of what you're able to do every day, and humans are not gonna get paid for much longer to do busy, mindless work. They are gonna get paid if they can do valuable, high-charge, high-impact thinking and problem solving. So, this is what we're trying to do, and we started that. Oh, that's one of the main reasons that we wrote Train Your Brain for the AI revolution, because we want to help more people do the things every day, get into the right brain states every day, where they can do what AI can't, they understand how to use AI in their workflows, and they can use it as the foundation for living the kind of life that they want to live. Um, and that's why we're talking about this today in the podcast, because I think that what we hear in um at events like Dav like Davos, they are hugely influential in what's going to be happening um in the next 12 months. So if they'd have said at Davos this year, well, you know what, AI is not no good and it's kind of a busted flush, it's a load of woo-woo, it's not real, then AI would have been far less important this year and going forwards, but it's just really up the ante again. So I'm convinced that AI um is gonna be everything, and much more than people are saying it is, and that's partly because we've been using it, we've been seeing it, and I think it's easy, it's easier for me to say to see that we last year alone we probably saved aboutÂŁ100,000 in our business by using AI technologies. Um, but by first of all, getting our own brain state sorted out and then using the technologies to create products faster, deal with legal things that we would have previously had to pay a solicitors to do, deal with accountanty things that we would have previously had to pay an accountant to do, lots of things that we did, and the very tangible example is actually writing train your brain for the higher evolution. AI isn't magic. We didn't say, I've got this idea for a book, AI, you write the book. It's a core, it's a tool that we use, you know, for lots of different things. Give me some cover ideas, give me some title ideas. This is a paragraph I've got. Help me to tweak it. Previously, we would have had to pay human beings to do that, and every time you have to engage a human being, it slows down the process. That's the other hidden benefit of working with AI. It's um instant, it's at your fingertips, it's like an evergreen 24-7ly available um Swiss Army knife consultant. There's a great example. I'm hugging the mic here, Andrew Holland back to you shortly, but this is something we talked about recently as well. There's been a great example in the UK in the last few weeks where one of our major police forces came under scrutiny because they used AI to create a threat report about the fans of uh an overseas football team that were coming to play, one of our teams, Aston Villa, in a European competition. They decided to ban these fans because they said they were too dangerous, uh, they wouldn't be able to police them properly. One of the things what they used it transpired AI to write their report, and the AI um said that this team had played a fixture against West Ham, another UK football team, and there'd been a lot of trouble at this fixture, and it was another data point to say why these fans were particularly problematic. Now it turns out that game never existed, it didn't happen. The AI people say hallucinated. What I would say is the person who was using the AI was hallucinating because they weren't taking responsibility for the output of the information. The AI is not in charge, the human is in charge, and they are responsible for the quality and the output, and they need to source check and fact check. Um, so yeah, so I've gone on there a little bit, Andrew, but I'm just trying to put some context around this and real examples.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and a real example is in preparing for this podcast, I I used AI to um to work with the article. But I also made a point of um of thinking, well, anything that the AI is is saying in terms, you know, that I think's interesting, I'm gonna double check that. That that is actually in in the article is coming from where it says it's coming from. Because like you say, uh we're we're responsible for what we say and what we do, and AI can be great tools to help with that, but we need to set up our own systems to make sure that that um when we're using AI, that we are um we're doing our bit, um, and that we can stand behind what we say and do uh as a consequence.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so we have to be responsible on that idea of you know taking 100% responsibility for your own behaviour. It's the foundation, you know. How well did you do your best to be at your best and achieve your goals yesterday? That's so so key. So the I want to wrap things, I want to wrap things up. We're not intending to scare you here, we're just trying to share real data points that are out there in the world, and all that data is pointing towards AI becoming bigger, faster, far more disruptive in 2026 than anybody was predicting 12 months ago. Um, and the good news is we've got you covered. That's why we wrote Train Your Brain for the AI Revolution. Uh, that's why we wrote the habit mechanic. But one of the things that we're we're seeing is that even when people understand what they need to do in the AI era, even when they understand AI better and how they can start to use it, what they need to do to become irreplaceable, they don't struggle understanding what they need to do, they struggle putting it into practice in real life because life is busy, the world is more overwhelming than ever before. And that's why we've created a new program, and it's called Six Habits Live. And this is where myself and Andrew and other colleagues we're working with with you in real time to help you actually put this into practice in in your life so that you can get all the benefits, so that you can focus on what you need to focus on in order to be healthy, be happy, be at your best, achieve the goals that you want to achieve. And the cornerstone of doing that is being able to do what AI can't, because if you can do the things consistently that AI can't do, you are irreplaceable. Um, so AI is going to be a positive in your life, not a negative. So if you're interested in Six Habits Live and us helping you, this is not a course, it's not um something that you need to do every week. It's just us being here to help you when you need us. Then I'll put a link beneath this podcast so you can check it out. Um, and then if you think it's a good fit for you, then we'd love to see you inside the program. And I personally look forward to working with you and helping you. It's the first time we've ever offered something like this, so I'm really excited about it. Um, so I'll put a link beneath the podcast. So I I believe more than ever AI is going to change the world, and if we're proactive, we can get that technology working for us in a way that makes it easier for us to be healthy, happy, and at our best. So for me, I think this is exciting. Um do you have any final thoughts, Andrew, before we close?

SPEAKER_01:

Only that it's yeah, it's a yeah, a lot of people see January as uh as an opportunity to to to look again at what they're doing, um take up new new things, and this this couldn't be a better um opportunity, but it doesn't matter what line of work you're in, uh it seems more evident than ever that AI is going to have a huge impact. And so it's it's it's well worth your time paying this some attention, and I haven't seen anything better uh in terms of shaping how you pay attention than tougher minds and the habit mechanic approach.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, so if you're interested in Six Habits Live, then there will be a link beneath the podcast. So I just want to I want to finish today by by just asking you a reflective question. You can rate yourself out of 10, and it's simply you know how well are you doing your best to really understand this technology and how you can actually utilize it to make your life easier, to get things done better, faster, not just necessarily your work, but also you know, there's so many utilities for this tech because it's just brain power on tap. So 10 means that you're perfect, and there's no way you could be doing any better. Zero or one means that you know you're failing, you're not doing anything. So wherever you are on that continuum, um just think about what you could do in the next 24 hours, just one small thing that's going to set you a step closer to getting a higher score on that continuum because that's the first starting point. It's how well are we doing our best to actually understand this and actually work on utilising um not just the technology but also our brain states to make our life easier. So that's a little bit of homework for you to think about. Um and you never know that one little thing that you might change might just be make all the difference in in helping you to be healthier, happier, or your best more often. Because you're only ever one brain state habit away.