AI and the Future of Work: Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace, Business, Ethics, HR, and IT for AI Enthusiasts, Leaders and Academics

SE 28: They Might Be Agentic, But We Have Agency: Leaders from Upwork, Axonis, and John Hancock on Where the Human Belongs | Live from Ai4 2026

• Dan Turchin • Season 7

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Walk the floor at an event like Ai4 and most of the conversation is about what machines can now do on their own. The question that kept surfacing in our conversations was quieter, and harder: where do humans belong when machines can think?

In this special compilation episode of AI and the Future of Work, we bring you three conversations recorded live at Ai4 2026 in Las Vegas. This is the first episode of our four-part Ai4 series.

A talent marketplace, a data infrastructure company, and a 164 year old life insurer. Three businesses that could not be more different, and three leaders who arrived at the same answer from opposite directions. 

What connects them is not caution about automation. All three are automating serious amounts of work. What they share is that the requirement was built in on purpose, because the outcome depends on someone being answerable for it.


Featured Guests

Over the next three weeks we will release one full conversation every Thursday. As each episode goes live, we will add the link here.


What You'll Learn

  • What happens when you measure how much of a real job an agent can actually finish, and why that number should change what you let it do unsupervised
  • The one line in hiring that should never be crossed, no matter how capable the technology becomes
  • Where human agency actually lives once the work itself is handed off, and why how it gets done may matter less than we assume
  • Why collecting data and acting on it are two different problems, and what opens up once that distance closes
  • The question worth asking before any AI project starts, and why the answer is sometimes something far simpler than AI
  • What to say to someone watching a machine learn to do the thing that made them valuable, and where the time that comes back should go


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Share your favorite insight about where people belong in the systems we are building, and tag us on social.

And don't forget to subscribe to AI and the Future of Work for more conversations with the leaders shaping the future of work.


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Dan Turchin

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