As a society, we are in a drastically new age for businesses and consumers, an era I call “The Robotic Age.” The addition of generative artificial intelligence to normal life is changing how we go about everyday ventures. For the past half-century, technical expertise has been the gold standard. Top-tier software engineers, accountants, consultants and more have been heavily pursued and built the technologically advanced society we live in today. This speedy technical prowess seemed nothing short of irreplaceable until now.

In The Robotic Age, many things previously deemed invaluable have now become “AI space.” Businesses are automating any tasks they can, saving both time and money. Mistakes may be cut to a minimum with human error out the window, but the human touch and emotion are lost in the trade-off. Corporations will become more technically advanced, but this upgraded efficiency has its limits. AI, despite being newly generative, is built from set code. It takes existing patterns from a billion pieces of human content and interactions, and it attempts to predict the next step based on these endless patterns. This means it has limitations; its knowledge is bound only to the inputs it receives. In other words, it only knows what humans know and cannot create a new thought for itself or stray away from its patterns.

Consider automated call centers for customer service, which have been used before The Robotic Age but still signify the integration of artificial intelligence into large corporations. If you have experienced dialing into one of these, you know they are nothing short of frustrating. You need to use the language patterns that the AI knows, even if it does not fully represent the reason for your call. If I string together sentences it does not recognize or do not follow the pre-programmed reasons for calling, I will be pushed back to the first step. Each time I talk to these robots, I find myself wishing it was a human so I could fully articulate my need or issue. With every advantage comes a disadvantage, and for all of AI’s advantages, there also comes the loss of human touch, a vital piece of society’s advancements since the beginning of time.

To combat the disadvantages of The Robotic Age, people of a new skillset will become the gold standard. These are what I call the free thinkers: the people who spend their lives thinking outside of the box, creating wild ideas and straying away from the monotonous rat race that society has developed. This capability is something AI simply cannot do yet, and these innovative thinkers will be whom corporations turn to for growth and new applications of AI. Our society is beginning to show similarities to the 19th century and earlier, when innovative thinkers such as Nikola Tesla and Benjamin Franklin were famous, powerful and sought after. The ability to empathize with consumers and apply it to production is irreplaceable, and the most successful consumer-based corporations will further pursue imaginative thinkers as AI becomes more prevalent.

We are technologically advancing more rapidly than ever before. During the Renaissance, when human advancement flourished, the most important driver of progress was no single invention but the abundance and availability of books, which drove literacy and in turn led to many great innovations and inventions we still see today. Humans learned from the wisdom and history of other humans. This has been a necessary component of growth for humanity for our whole existence.

Generative AI is growing exponentially, at a rate no human creation has grown before, and it will continue to affect the world drastically and in unforeseen ways. But businesses need free, out-of-the-box thinkers to keep up in today’s society. Whether it’s to find creative ways of using AI for a company’s daily tasks or finding ways around its use, there will be a great demand for divergence. We can see this principle on display as many companies are now implementing the design-thinking process, which puts users first before designing a product. It is based around empathy, something a robot cannot quite understand. The world of business is changing quickly, but it will be up to free-thinking and visionary humans, not robots, to determine the direction.

Alex Lakatta (alakatta@unc.edu) is a student at the University of North Carolina studying business and finance. He grew up in Baltimore.