Agency

There are two kinds of people in the AI age.

The first kind sees a problem and fixes it. They don’t wait for permission. They don’t wait for a meeting. They see the gap, figure out a solution, and move. AI makes them terrifyingly effective because they already knew what they wanted to do. AI just made it faster.

The second kind opens ChatGPT and types “what should I do today?”

That’s the divide. Not intelligence. Not technical skill. Not credentials. Agency. The ability to act without being told. To generate your own direction. To take ownership of outcomes nobody assigned to you.

Everything else I’ll write about in this series builds on this. You can’t develop judgment if you never make decisions. You can’t build integrity if you never take responsibility. Agency is the foundation. Without it, the other skills have nowhere to live.

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What agency actually is

I want to be precise here because this word gets thrown around loosely.

Agency is not ambition. Ambitious people want things. People with agency do things. There’s a massive gap between wanting a promotion and restructuring your workflow so you become indispensable. The first is a desire. The second is agency.

Agency is not confidence either. Plenty of confident people wait for direction. They believe they’ll crush it once someone tells them what to crush. People with agency don’t wait for that signal.

Here’s my working definition: agency is the capacity to identify what needs to happen and make it happen, without external prompting. You see the problem before someone points it out. You start building the solution before anyone asks.

Psychologists call this “personal initiative” - going beyond assigned tasks, developing your own goals, solving problems that haven’t occurred yet. Researchers at the University of Sheffield found that proactive, self-directed workers don’t just perform better. They experience their work as more meaningful. They connect with the future through their actions.

That last part matters more than you think.

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Why AI makes this the number one skill

AI is the most powerful tool ever created for people who know what they want to do. And it’s completely useless for people who don’t.

AI can write your code, draft your strategy, generate your marketing copy, design your product mockups. It can do all of this in minutes. But it cannot decide what’s worth building. It cannot look at your organization and say “this is broken and here’s why.” That requires a human with direction.

In my Jobs of the Future series, I described five roles that remain fundamentally human - roles built around judgment, meaning-making, and accountability. Every single one demands someone who acts first and asks permission later. The Clarity Steward doesn’t wait to be told the strategy is drifting. The Execution Orchestrator doesn’t wait to be told the architecture is wrong. They see it and they move.

AI is also flattening organizations. Teams are shrinking. Hierarchies are compressing. Companies are hitting $10M revenue with teams under 10 people. At that scale, everyone is self-directed or the company doesn’t exist. There’s no manager to give you quarterly objectives. You set your own direction or you produce nothing.

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The agency decay problem

Here’s what scares me.

There’s a concept researchers call “agency decay.” It works like muscle atrophy. The less you use your capacity for self-direction, the weaker it gets. And AI makes it very easy to stop using it.

The pattern: you start by experimenting with AI. Then you integrate it into your workflow. Then you rely on it. Then you can’t function without it. Each step feels like efficiency. Cumulatively, it’s a loss of capability.

A study from SBS Swiss Business School found a strong negative correlation between frequent AI use and critical thinking ability. The neuroscience is straightforward - neural pathways you don’t use get pruned. When AI handles your analysis, your planning, your problem-solving, the brain regions responsible for those functions weaken.

This is the paradox. AI amplifies agency. But if you don’t have agency to begin with, AI becomes the thing that destroys what’s left of it. You outsource your thinking until you can’t think anymore.

I’ve seen this in organizations already. People who can’t write a paragraph without running it through AI first. People who can’t make a decision without asking a chatbot. People who have basically become prompt-typists - sitting between a manager giving orders and an AI executing them, adding no value in between.

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What it looks like in practice

A person with agency in a product team doesn’t wait for the product manager to identify bugs. They use the product themselves, notice the rough edges, and either fix them or raise them with specific recommendations. Not “this feels off.” Instead: “the onboarding flow loses 40% of users at step three. Here’s why, and here’s a fix.”

A person with agency in their career doesn’t wait for their industry to collapse and then scramble. They learn AI tools now. They build new skills now. They position themselves for what’s coming, not what’s already here.

The common thread: they generate action from within. The prompt comes from them, not from someone else.

The negative definition is useful too. Lack of agency is the person who says “nobody told me to do that.” The person who waits for the meeting to raise what they’ve known for weeks. The person who complains about the problem without ever attempting a solution.

I’m not judging. I’ve been that person at different points in my life. But I am saying clearly: in the AI age, that posture is a death sentence for your career. Not in twenty years. In three to five.

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Can you build it?

Yes. Full stop.

Agency is not a personality trait you’re born with. It’s a capability you develop through practice. It develops through taking progressively larger risks and owning the outcomes.

Start small. Identify one problem in your work that nobody asked you to solve. Solve it. Don’t ask permission first. Just do it and present the result. Notice the resistance you feel before doing it - the voice that says “that’s not my job” or “what if I’m wrong?” That resistance is the thing you’re training against.

Then go bigger. Propose a project you believe in. Build a prototype of something you think should exist. Push back on a decision you disagree with - not by complaining in private, but by making your case to the person who made it.

Each time you do this, you’re strengthening the muscle. And like any muscle, it gets stronger with consistent use.

There’s a dark side to acknowledge. Agency without other skills is dangerous. The person who acts decisively but in the wrong direction causes more damage than the person who does nothing. Agency without judgment is recklessness. Agency without empathy is bulldozing.

That’s why this is the first skill in the series, not the only one. Agency gives you the capacity to act. The skills that follow determine whether your actions are worth a damn.

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How to know if this is you

You have a default bias toward action. When you see a problem, your first instinct is to do something about it, not analyze it endlessly.

You generate your own projects. You see gaps and fill them without being asked.

You’re comfortable being wrong. People without agency often avoid action because they’re terrified of failure. People with agency fail constantly - they just don’t let it stop them.

You take responsibility easily. When something goes wrong and you were involved, you own it, learn from it, and move on.

If this sounds like you, the AI age is your moment. The leverage available to one person with real agency and AI fluency is unlike anything in human history.

And if this doesn’t sound like you yet - that’s fine. It’s developable. Start small. Start now. Don’t wait for someone to assign you the project of developing your own agency.

That would sort of defeat the purpose.

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This is Part 2 of the Skills of the Future series. Next: the skill that keeps everything from falling apart when pressure mounts.