What’s your level of AI stress?
That question echoed throughout a dinner we hosted for +50 people from tech, fashion, and retail during D-Congress in Gothenburg two weeks ago. The setting was intimate, and the discussions ran high in the vaulted ceilings of Götabergs Kök & Bar, a stone’s throw from Carl Milles iconic Poseidon sculpture at Götaplatsen.
I used my role as MC to ask people what they felt about the AI discussion that had been roaming the industry since the agentid commerce of NRF in New York back in January.
Someone said that retailers need to go back to basics and focus on the brand, assortment, and service offerings that made them successful in the first place. Another highlighted the endless opportunities that the AI tools offer us, and that we shouldn’t be afraid to utilise them, or else the American tech giants will run os over completely.
Around the tables, people exchanged tips and tricks with their ChatGPT and Gemini usage, how to spot AI-written emails (the overuse of commas in the introductory “Hey,” is highly suspicious in a Nordic email tradition), and whether or not one should switch to Claude (you should, you just haven’t yet).
If there was AI stress, the stress was mild and positive. There is, at least for D-Congress attendees, a lot of work to be done.
Speaking of work. Have you heard of Jevons Paradox?
There is an increasingly strong counter-debate to the “AI will take our jobs” narrative happening right now, and in the midst of this, the Jevons Paradox phenomenon is making the rounds.
The Jevons Paradox holds that when technology becomes cheaper and more effective, its use actually increases. It was first described in 1865 by William Stanley Jevons, who observed that although steam engines became more efficient, the use of coal actually increased.
This has proven true for many technologies since, from cars to computers to lightning.
In the context of AI and work displacement, one example is when Geoffrey Hinton famously proclaimed in 2016 that “we should stop training radiologists now”, since AI will obviously take their jobs.
Then years later, the demand for radiologists is bigger than ever, not despite AI, but because the use of advanced MRIs and other imaging techniques requires more radiologists to operate them.
Then the cost of technology goes down, the usage goes up.
This, many optimists argue, is proof that AI will not reduce the number of jobs but will, in fact, increase them.
Retailers need to go back to basics and focus on the brand, assortment, and service offerings that made them successful in the first place.
I find it fascinating that the people screaming the loudest about how “AI will change everything” are the developers who created it.
Why is this?
On the one hand, we have the AI companies themselves, who need to find increasingly bombastic narratives to justify their outlandish valuations and funding needs.
It makes sense. If you are asking your investors for €110 billion (say, what?!), as OpenAI did in its latest funding round, it can’t just be to replace your everyday SaaS tools. Surely, the technology must be earth-shattering, humanity-changing, and potentially existential-threatening.
On the other hand, the people seeing the greatest effect of the technology are the ones who developed it – programmers.
Anyone who has dabbled with Lovable or Claude Code can testify that we might not need programmers in the future. Instead of asking an overpaid developer, who’s been a scarce resource, entrepreneurs and creatives can simply ask the computer to realise their vision, and it will do it.
Developing code is something Ai is uniquely equipped to do. It lives within a well-defined space and can easily be quality-controlled – by itself.
This is in stark contrast to most other work, with lives in a messy interaction between people, organisations, legislative bodies, market dynamics, user interfaces and consumer behaviours. We all agree that AI will play a huge role in whatever work you are doing, but chances are, it will make the need for your expertise all the more valuable.
To nuance this, I urge you to follow something called the Artificiality Institute, which runs a highly enlightening Instagram account on AI and automation. One recent video raised this crucial question: Is AI taking the hard part or the easy part of your job?
The example was London cab drivers of old, who had to take an extensive test to prove they had learned all of the city’s 25 000+ streets. Then came GPS and Uber and automated away the hardest part of driving a cab – remembering the streets. Threshold for entry sank; suddenly anyone could drive a cab, and salaries plummeted.
On the flipside, accountants have gotten better paid because of technology. Computers automated away the easy part, the data entry, the bookkeeping, the repetitive calculations. Left was the complex analytical work that required more expertise, not less.
As I’m preparing our upcoming events in 2026, our dinners and roundtable, our live talks and conferences, this is what I will lean on. Knowledge is everywhere, content is easy to consume, but human interactions are scarce and hard to come by.
In a recent interview, Peter Steinberger, the founder of Moltbot, the much-hyped AI agent, said that in the future, nobody will need apps. We will only tell the AI/computer what to do, and it will go out and do that thing. No need to open a web browser, write an email, or search for an upcoming trip.
This was just another example of a tech-bro overhyping his own achievement and undervaluing everything that makes human interaction actually work. There is something to be said for trust, credibility, and design, which I actually think will be in greater demand as technology becomes more ubiquitous.
Intelligence will become a commodity, and yes, a lot will be done by our AI bots (I actually look forward to it booking my next flight for me). But because of this, we will value curation, user experience, and the status symbols of certain tools and communities all the more.
As I’m preparing our upcoming events in 2026, our dinners and roundtable, our live talks and conferences, this is what I will lean on. Knowledge is everywhere, content is easy to consume, but human interactions are scarce and hard to come by.
