The AI they cannot build

I recently returned from Singapore, where my daughter-boss, Rachel and I attended SuperAI, Asia’s largest AI conference at Marina Bay Sands.

- FRANCIS J. KONG

The event hosted 10,000 attendees, 150 speakers and nearly every major technology company, including Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Armand Mistral. Companies that once seemed futuristic are now actively networking on the convention floor.

I attended keynotes on AI agents, frontier models, robotics, planetary intelligence and the economics of compute. Experts discussed the rapid pace of change, the shortening relevance of skills and the emerging divide between the AI-literate and the AI-inexperienced.

After two days, my key takeaway was not a technical insight, but a reminder of something fundamentally human.

Matt Abrahams, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, has taught strategic communication to executives for nearly 20 years. He does not dismiss AI or downplay its impact, but he has observed a notable trend in his classroom. His MBA students frequently ask: With AI advancing, what will remain for us?

His answer is always unexpected.

He refers to it as Old School AI — the original AI: Genuineness and Influence.

This is not simply advice to “be yourself.” Abrahams makes a more nuanced point.

Content creation is now faster and more affordable than ever. Large language models can generate reports, presentations, marketing materials, meeting summaries and business proposals more efficiently and cost-effectively than humans. As a result, we are inundated with technically accurate but emotionally empty output, creating overwhelming noise.