The World Has Been Rewarding the Wrong Thing

For most of modern professional life, success has been built on a simple equation: accumulate knowledge, process it faster than others, and you win. Intelligence — defined as the speed at which you can access and apply information — has been the premium currency of the workplace.

AI is devaluing that currency in real time.

This isn’t a metaphor or a thought experiment. It’s already happening. Generative AI tools can synthesise, retrieve, and produce knowledge-based work faster and more comprehensively than any individual. And as Cameron Hedrick, Chief Learning Officer at Citi, articulated in a recent conversation with IKN CEO Sarah Clarke, we are not even at the steep part of the curve yet.

“Wisdom is something different,” Cameron explained. “The premium on wisdom and discernment is going up because that’s something that machines do not do well — that humans are particularly great at.”

What Is Wisdom, Actually?

Wisdom is a word that gets used loosely, so it’s worth being precise. Cameron’s working definition is clarifying: wisdom is knowing what matters. Not what you can do. What you should.

It’s the difference between a Photoshop expert who knows every technique and the artist who knows which ones serve the story. The technical knowledge can now be replicated by AI. The artistic judgment — the discernment behind the choice — cannot.

This distinction cuts to the heart of where human value is migrating. The skills that are becoming most critical are not the ones that are easiest to teach, measure, or credential. They are things like:

• Ethical judgment — the ability to assess not just what is possible, but what is right
• Discernment — knowing which of the thousand things AI can generate is the one that actually matters
• Psychological safety — creating the conditions in which teams — human and increasingly machine — can do their best work
• Systems thinking — understanding how everything connects, not just optimising one piece at a time
• Context and political intelligence — reading environments, relationships, and dynamics that no model can fully map

The Problem: You Can’t Microwave Wisdom

Here is where the challenge becomes acute for L&D leaders specifically: wisdom does not develop through a training module. Cameron put it plainly — “you can’t microwave it. It’s a crock pot or a slow cooker.”

Wisdom accumulates through experience, reflection, failure, and the repeated work of making consequential choices in ambiguous situations. It builds across years and decades. You cannot compress it into a learning journey, assign it a completion percentage, or measure it in a post-training assessment.

This is a genuine crisis for organisations that are accustomed to addressing capability gaps by adding content. More e-learning, more workshops, more frameworks — none of it will build the qualities that are about to become most valuable.

What You Can Do Right Now

The good news, as Cameron frames it, is that you don’t have to solve the entire problem to start moving in the right direction. Two things that managers and L&D leaders can begin immediately:

1. Create a genuine culture of AI experimentation. Not an AI Academy with curated content and a certificate at the end. A real culture where people are encouraged to try things, make mistakes, and learn through use. If your organisation is still gate-keeping AI experimentation, you are already behind.

2. Introduce structured reflection into everyday work. The undergirding of wisdom is the ability to understand implications over time and across multiple inputs. Start building that capacity now by asking different questions: Why did you make that choice? What are the connections between your decision and its environment? What might happen in one month, six months, three years? These questions, practiced consistently, start to build the cognitive wiring that wisdom requires.

The Uncomfortable Truth for L&D

If wisdom can’t be microwaved, L&D leaders face an existential question about their own function. The traditional model — identify a gap, source content, deliver training, measure completion — is not well-suited to developing the qualities that are about to matter most.

The leaders who thrive in this environment will be the ones who are willing to ask a harder question: not “what content should we provide?” but “what conditions do we need to create?” That is a fundamentally different job — and a significantly more important one.

The wisdom economy is already here. The question is whether you’re building for it.