Would you cut out your brain to lose weight?

Of course not. Yet cutting your people to save costs is exactly that trade: you lose the judgment, relationships, and know-how your growth runs on, just to shave a line on a spreadsheet.

Learn how to fuel growth, increase customer value, and lead innovation in the age of AI, without cutting out your company's heart and soul.

Expected release September 2026 Join the waitlist & get your free preview

The Human Choice Series

Human By
Design

How to Build Organisations That Last in a World Rewritten by AI

Jeroen Keppens

The real question

This was never about whether to use AI. Everyone's using AI. It's about what you do with the time and money it frees up.

A cut lands on next quarter's numbers; the payoff from redeploying people is just as real but slower to surface. So most companies drift toward the cut by default, not by decision, because it's the figure the board can see. The ones who pull ahead refuse to let the visible number make the call.

Replace, and you save once. Redeploy, and the value compounds, year after year. Same cost base, growing value.

Inside the book

Four movements, in the order the problem actually reaches you.

Not steps to complete, but orientations to hold — each one a shift in how you see the problem before you act on it.

Awaken

Understand what you're dealing with.

See what AI is actually doing to work, to your organisation, and to the people inside it. You cannot decide honestly from a position of managed ignorance.

Align

Decide what your organisation is for.

Direction, not just strategy. What you believe about your purpose, your people, and the trade-offs you are actually willing to make.

Activate

Build what that requires.

The specific capabilities to build, and an honest assessment of where you are starting from. Where the roadmap meets the resistance of actually building.

Gravitate

Make it the way you work.

Not a project with an end date, but a rhythm that becomes organisational character. Where most programmes decay, this is the difference.

Your free preview

The ideas that will change how you decide.

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The Introduction — “The Room Where It Landed”
The meeting almost every leadership team has already had, and the choice sitting underneath it that no one quite named: is AI here to take cost out, or to free your people up for the work that matters more?
“The Rewired Factory”
Why deploying AI is not the win. The payoff comes only when you redesign the work around it — otherwise you bank a saving that built nothing. The proof runs through electricity, the cash machine, and the failure economists call “so-so technology”.
“The Turing Trap”
The idea the book turns on: two companies, the same tools, opposite futures — decided by a single question about where the freed time goes. Where the argument stops being a diagram and becomes a decision you make in person.
A tool: “The Cut-or-Compound Test”
Something you can use on Monday. Two questions, one role at a time: what should the machine take, and where should that person's judgment go instead? The line between capacity that compounds and capacity quietly banked as a cut.

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The author's grounding

Practice first. Oxford second.

The thinking in this book comes from 25 years of leading real teams through real change. The author then completed the University of Oxford Saïd Business School's AI-Driven Business Transformation Executive Programme, finishing in the top “exceeds expectations” band (94.8%).

The thinking this builds on

Erik Brynjolfsson, who named the Turing Trap
Daron Acemoglu, on “so-so” automation
Geoffrey Hinton, on what we're building
Yuval Noah Harari, on meaning and machines

The book hasn't launched yet (release planned for September 2026), so you'd be among the very first leaders to read it, and to shape what comes next.

The author

A practitioner, not a pundit.

Jeroen Keppens has spent 25 years in the room where technology meets people: developer, architect, scrum master, product lead, and the line manager responsible for real teams through real change. He currently leads teams in the public & tech sector, and founded SkillTilt to help organisations adopt AI without hollowing themselves out. He completed Oxford Saïd Business School's AI-Driven Business Transformation Executive Programme in its top band.

The evidence

The proof is already in the wild.

Klarna

Cut first, then reversed

The fintech automated much of its customer support with AI, boasting that its assistant did the work of 700 agents, and cut headcount to save costs. By May 2025 it had reversed course and was rehiring: the CEO admitted the drive to cut had gone too far, and customers wanted a human for the cases that mattered. The AI handled the volume; the judgment and the relationships had left with the people.

Duolingo

The message that backfired

In April 2025 its CEO told staff the company would go “AI-first” and gradually stop using contractors for work AI could do. The cold framing triggered a fierce backlash: loyal users deleted the app in protest, and within weeks he walked it back, saying he had “not given enough context” and that no full-time staff were being replaced. Signalling that you will trade people for AI can cost you trust long before it ever saves a salary.

IKEA

Redeployed, not removed

As its chatbot took on nearly half of all customer queries, IKEA made the opposite call: rather than cut its call-centre staff, it retrained 8,500 of them as remote interior-design advisors. The capacity the technology freed up became a new service, one that has since grown into a revenue channel worth around €1.3 billion a year.

Amazon

Efficiency as investment

Amazon committed more than $700 million to its “Upskilling 2025” programme, a pledge to retrain 100,000 of its US employees for higher-skilled roles rather than replace them as automation spread. It treated the time AI saved as capital to reinvest in its people, betting that a workforce that grows with the technology compounds in value where one that is cut only saves once.