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Pausing Netflix to place an order for Amazon Key In-Garage Delivery from the backseat of an Uber.

Experiences like this exemplify a new normal into which most of us have settled comfortably: in work and life, we don’t have to go it alone if an app can help.

Despite the fact that the phrase “there’s an app for that” originated as a joke, it’s not an exaggerated promise. 

Nine out of 10 U.S. adults own a smartphone with millions of mobile apps to choose from in the Apple and Google app stores alone.

And just 10 percent of workers make minimal use of the internet on the job.

Today we’re in the early days of an emerging next new normal for work and life in which we won’t have to go it alone if an AI can help.

At current course and speed, this means at a minimum the type of Generative AI (“GenAI” for short) provided by Large Language Models (LLMs). OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Google’s Gemini are examples of LLM-powered GenAI apps.

On the one hand, there are reasons to be optimistic about this.

For example: according to a June 2025 survey conducted by consultancy Deloitte more than half of U.S. consumers (53 percent) are either experimenting with GenAI or using it regularly. Of those regular users, 42 say GenAI has had a “very positive” effect on their lives.

But on the other hand, a comparable percentage of all U.S. adults–43 percent–fear that artificial intelligence will harm them, according to another survey by the Pew Research Center. 

Another third isn’t sure whether it will help or harm them.

As a strategist, technologist, and lifelong geek who has lived, worked, and prospered through a computer landing on every desk and a phone finding a place in everyone’s pocket, those were numbers I found impossible to ignore.

So the first reason I wrote this book is to ensure that everyone is personally equipped to benefit from GenAI in whatever hats they wear in work and life.

The second is to motivate readers to put their shoulder to the wheel and  lend a hand at creating the best possible future in which GenAI is always at hand.

That’s because–whether they happen to be employees at your company, students at your school, or even members of your own family–all the people who are presently worried or uncertain about what’s in store for them in our next new normal shouldn’t have to go it alone if another human can help, either.

To these ends, it is organized as follows.

The first section addresses why you should care about GenAI and what it can do for you and any organization or community to which you belong, right now, if you so choose.

I’ll offer an opinionated recipe for how to make the most of it in both individual and collective endeavors.

The next addresses how to keep the journey to our next new normal on the right track. 

We all have an interest in a more effective, efficient, and humane transition in business, education, and society. And to one extent or another, we all have some degree of influence on how GenAI plays out in one or more of these domains.

So I hope to inspire and equip you to take a leadership role rather than just going along for the ride in at least one.

Then there’s a turn to a very practical focus on building GenAI strategies. 

I’ll address the brass tacks of turning it into a driver of business growth, shared learning, and greater personal self-realization.

By the end of those chapters, you’ll be set up for success as a sounding board or thought partner for anyone in your life trying to get a handle on GenAI, whether it’s your board of directors or your kid starting college.

Finally, I’ll wrap up with a point of view on where things stand where they might be going, aimed at equipping you to chart your own course, on your own terms, on big issues relating to policy, equity, the future of artistic creativity and more.

Whether you are a skeptical newbie or a seasoned GenAI expert or somewhere in between, this book is intended to help you in three ways.

First: I will relentlessly focus on what anyone can and should be doing, right now, with the GenAI available today. I will strive mightily for any chapter that you may find relevant to your work and life to flow smoothly into “what are we waiting for–let’s get to it!”

Second: if you’re an expert, I probably am not going to tell you anything technical you don’t already know. But I may provide new ways to explain what you know to non-technical people. 

If you’re not technical, I’ll ensure that you know enough to make informed decisions about GenAI, use it to good effect, and sort the AI hypesters from the AI minimizers.

Third and most important: this book is intended to equip you to win big on a big bet. One that you might want to be part of turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So far the discussion about GenAI in relation to human work has been framed in a bipolar way.

On one side: using it to enhance human capabilities, or augmentation.

And on the other: using it to replace human activity, or automation. 

The latter sometimes implicitly or explicitly carries with it the potential for more AI to mean fewer jobs.

Like it or not, it’s a possibility that can’t be dismissed out of hand. That’s because more so than any previous technology, it can mimic human cognition and behavior.

But there’s something else distinctive about GenAI that suggests to me there is a third way to think about GenAI and its implications for the future of human endeavor.

It can behave better and do more through interaction with humans who are themselves ready, willing, and able to invest in making the most of it.

Being “better together” with GenAI is a two-way street in a way that we haven’t experienced with any previous technology. 

And whether doing work for pay or undertaking a labor of love, any human able to think, speak, and write can step into the role of bringing out the very best of human and AI working in concert.

In this book I call this strategy the pursuit of complementarity.

To start to envision what this third way might look like, consider two groups of musicians.

One band is aiming to follow a score (and nothing more).

But the other is an improvisational jazz band.

Even if each were composed of the same number of people with equivalent experience playing the same instruments, they would in fact be engaged in two radically different activities.

The members of the latter are making a willing investment in being progressively better together, both individually and collectively, through give and take, call and response, and iterative adaptation.

You might even say (to use some of the words and concepts associated with GenAI) they prompt each other and shape and reshape the context.

The premise of complementarity is that with GenAI, we are being given the opportunity to participate in a new kind of ensemble. One in which this sort of back-and-forth matters every bit as much. 

For no other reasons than our smartphones and the Internet, GenAI being always at hand is a fait accompli.

But in this new normal, rather than GenAI serving as an ever-present crutch that risks making us lazy, maybe a better way to think about it is that GenAI will offer an always-open invitation to jam.

We don’t yet know what the GenAI-era equivalents of app-based experiences like pausing Netflix to place an order for Amazon Key In-Garage Delivery from the backseat of an Uber will be.

But unlike in the case of those apps, producers aren’t straitjacketed by what compiles and consumers don’t have to be passive recipients of deterministic functionality.

With GenAI, co-creating what happens in and results from those experiences is about us as much as it is about it.

Every iota of human qualities like ingenuity, diligence, enthusiasm, passion, discipline, drive, focus, and grit can play a part in making the most of GenAI during both the creation and consumption of new experiences.

A question I will return to throughout this book is that maybe we humans would do ourselves a solid leaning into making the so-called “Era of AI” the “Age of Interplay” instead.

If so, then pole position conceiving, delivering, and benefitting from them will be won by people and organizations that deliberately marshal everything humans can bring to the table to make the most of it making the most of them.

The race will be won by giving everyone a sound place to start, a brightly lit path to follow, and reason to go the extra mile.

In the next new normal, that may be a winning way to start each day, whether the goal is for students to learn like greased lightning or a Fortune 500 to grow like gangbusters.

I hope this book offers a recipe and a roadmap for doing just that.

So what are we waiting for?

Let’s get to it.

Copyright 2026 Bryan Kirschner