home

Envisioning a next new normal

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

Experiences like this epitomize 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 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. And 42 percent of its regular users say GenAI has had a “very positive” effect on their lives.

But on the other hand, a nearly identical percentage of all U.S. adults–43 percent–fear that artificial intelligence will harm rather than help them, according to another survey by the Pew Research Center. Another third aren’t sure either way.

As a strategist, technologist, and lifelong geek, I’ve lived, worked, and prospered through a computer landing on every desk and a phone winning a place in everyone’s pocket. So those were numbers I felt I couldn’t ignore.

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

While the second is to motivate readers to put their shoulder to the wheel to help create a future in which no one is left out or left behind in that next new normal.

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

I hope you’ll choose to join team helper.

To that end, this book is organized as follows.

The first section addresses what GenAI 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 human endeavors.

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

We all have an interest in an effective, efficient, and humane transition from a world with no GenAI in it to one in which GenAI is ubiquitous. To one extent or another, we all have at least some influence on how that will play out in business, education, and society.

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

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.

I’ll 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 a Fortune 500 board of directors or a kid starting college.

Finally, I’ll wrap up with a point of view on where things stand where they might be going to help you chart your own course, on your own terms, on 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 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 hype merchants from the minimizers.

Third and most important: this book is intended to equip you to win a big bet about what the best possible future could look like.

So far we’ve been offered two options for our relationship with GenAI.

One is  using it to enhance our capabilities, as a tool in our toolbox. This is often described as a strategy of  augmentation. 

The other is using it to replace human activity. This is often described as a strategy of automation. And it sometimes implicitly or explicitly carries with it the prospect of  more AI meaning 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, GenAI can mimic human communication, cognition, and behavior.

But there’s something else distinctive about GenAI that suggests there’s a third way to think about GenAI and what it means to the future of individual and collective human endeavors.

It can respond to human communication, cognition, and behavior. 

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.

This isn’t speculative: it’s measurable.

In AI firm Anthropic’s study of millions of real-world GenAI interactions, there’s a very high correlation between the number of years of education required to understand a human prompt and the AI’s response. 

In the researchers’ words: “This highlights the importance of skills and suggests that how humans prompt the AI determines how effective it can be…While Claude is able to respond in a highly sophisticated manner, it tends to do so only when users input sophisticated prompts.”

To cut to the chase: better inputs produce better outputs.

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

In this book I call pursuing this strategy seeking complementarity.

If automation is what GenAI can do instead of me and augmentation is what anyone can do by using GenAI as directed, complementarity is what GenAI and I can accomplish together because of me.

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

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

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 be engaged in two radically different activities.

The members of the latter are making an 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 terms and concepts associated with GenAI) they prompt each other and dynamically reshape their shared context.

Thanks to their nature and training, LLM’s can’t help but respond to creative human coaxing.

We are thereby being given an opportunity to participate in a new kind of ensemble. One in which something like the sort of back-and-forth through which bands make magic happen matters in a profound way. 

If for no other reasons than our smartphones and the Internet, in the next new normal having GenAI always at hand is a fait accompli. 

But rather than fearing it as an ever-present crutch tempting us to be lazy, what if we instead learned to embrace it as an  always-open invitation to jam?

Enter the archimage elicitor

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 those apps, producers aren’t straitjacketed by what compiles as code and consumers don’t have to be passive recipients of deterministic functionality.

For example: Netflix’ recommendation system as we’ve  known  it is cutting edge traditional AI. But as a Netflix subscriber (even an engaged and technically savvy one), I can’t smash the “like” button any harder than anyone else.

With GenAI, co-creating what happens in and results from new experiences can be about us  as much as it is about it. And while education–as documented in Anthropic’s research–certainly helps set people up for success, it’s dedication that will make all the difference.

After all, we’re each experts about our own context, intentions, and goals.

More so than any precious technology, 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.

Enter the concept of archimage elicitor. It’s anyone with wizard-like  skills to evoke or draw out more from GenAI through their guidance to it or questions of it.

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 any given context.

The “incantations” are words we already know (or, to put a fine point on it, that GenAI can also help us learn).

And the bulk of the magic will flow not from won’t be the product of  (for example) having the most technical knowledge of computer science. 

Instead, it will be rooted in the deepest attunement to what a person is trying to do, for whom, and why.

So it just might be that conceiving, delivering, and benefitting from the most valuable and delightful GenAI experiences could be a function of marshaling everything humans bring to the table to make “better together” the best it can be.

And that the way to do that is by giving everyone a sound place to start, a brightly lit path to follow, and good reason to go the extra mile.

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