Electric Bikes and AI - tackle what wasn't possible before

Electric bikes are a great analogy to help your high performers see the value in using AI.

Across domains like design, writing, coding, law and finance, your experts — the people who have been doing this for years and would consider themselves at the top of their game — can easily look at AI as lowering the bar for their work:

• AI slop
• Generic designs
• Hallucinated cases
• Poorly thought-through analysis

"AI is no good for me — people have no idea what really goes into my work."

Electric bikes open up new routes

I love going for a long trail run at the weekends. I live on the Mendip Hills in Somerset, and we have plenty of mountain bikers who ride the trails here.

A couple of weekends ago I was running along when these two mountain bikers came past me, chatting away. I saw they were on the newer electric bikes — you pedal, but the bike turns your own energy into something more powerful.

For a moment I caught myself thinking, "Hmm, is that a bit like cheating? Surely a real mountain biker wouldn't have the help."

Then suddenly these two guys veered off the side of the track and up a hidden, near-vertical path into the side of the forest. I had to stop and watch.

It felt like it was 45 degrees — I would have struggled to run up it — but up they went, out of their seats, putting in the graft, taking on a trail that would never have been possible without the electric bikes.

As is normal these days, being so engrained in this world, my first thought was: "This is AI!"

How AI becomes the "electric bike" for your high performers

For your high performers, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot aren't about lowering the floor of their current work. They're about raising the ceiling — taking on new challenges they didn't consider possible before.

• A backend engineer who ships their own frontend — not just passable React, but something they'd actually show the product manager or a client.
• A corporate lawyer who's always handed off IP work and can now do a competent first-pass trademark analysis or draft an IP clause without briefing a specialist.
• An FP&A analyst who builds a proper financial model from scratch — where previously they'd have relied on a template or asked a more senior colleague.
• A sales rep entering a new vertical — say, moving from SaaS to financial services — who gets genuinely up to speed on the buyer's world in days, not months.

Help your high performers discover new routes

Your best people will uncover this themselves, but you can help them — don't leave it to chance.

You may already have a high performers or future leaders programme. Consider adding a track where you help these individuals look at the adjacent roles, tasks and challenges to their current work.

What is it that they don't feel capable of today, but with a bit of carved-out time, some coaching (and some AI) they'd feel comfortable having a go at?

I hope this analogy helps you as you have these discussions with your high performers. AI isn't here to dumb down your job and take it from you. It's the superpower that's going to let you go up a near-vertical track!