Christian Kromme opened his Edge Slovenia keynote by challenging an assumption about the future. The futurist, technology strategist, bestselling author, and former technology entrepreneur spends his career studying where technology and organizations are heading, yet he doesn’t envision a future that becomes colder or less human as artificial intelligence advances. He sees the opposite possibility. AI is making technology easier to use, accelerating automation, and giving ordinary people access to capabilities once reserved for specialists.
For Dscoopers, Christian said, the important question is how to position your business to benefit from that wave of change — and what distinctly human value you contribute when doing so.
Christian’s unusual framework for understanding that future comes from biology. Years ago, a life-threatening illness affecting his infant daughter led him to study how cells communicate, collaborate, adapt, and solve problems. His daughter survived and is now 15, and that experience ultimately influenced his work with organizations and his book, “Humanification.” At the event in Ljubljana, Christian described seven waves through which biological organisms evolved and argued that human organizations are moving through a remarkably similar progression with technology. In his framework, we are now in the sixth wave: artificial intelligence, which will enable organizations to learn and adapt in real time, manage greater complexity, and automate more of the planning, reasoning, decision-making, and repetitive work people perform today.
Christian sees plenty of reasons to be curious. He pointed to AI already being applied to design, prepress automation, visual content creation, predictive maintenance, quality control, autonomous planning, supply chains, and other business processes. Yet he also sees something inherently valuable about print in an increasingly digital world: its physical and emotional qualities.
“Printing carries emotional weight,” he said. “It’s unique to paper. It’s unique to print.”
As AI expands what can be created digitally, he encouraged Dscoopers to think in possibilities, including new connections between AI and physical production, rather than viewing technological change primarily as a threat.
The larger transformation, in his view, will be about people. If AI and robotics make efficiency, productivity, knowledge, and certain cognitive abilities increasingly accessible, competing primarily on those qualities becomes harder. Christian believes value will shift toward what he calls “heart skills”: curiosity, empathy, ethics, compassion, relationships, purpose, intuition, creativity, and lived experience. A machine can possess information about heat, he noted, without ever burning itself on a stove. It can describe an apple without ever tasting one. Humans, however, bring understanding, experience, emotion, and judgment to knowledge. Christian challenged leaders in the room to consider what machines should handle and where people can add uniquely human value.
“Start to search for your spark, and to see technology as a large amplifier,” he said. The more powerful the amplifier becomes, the more it matters what you put in it.”
