Two months ago, I assumed leaving corporate life might mean becoming less productive.
For most of my career, productivity happened inside an organisation. There was a salary, a job title, teams of specialists, systems, budgets, meetings and people with expertise in things I didn’t understand. And, if I’m being fair to my former corporate self, quite a lot of PowerPoint.
I had also absorbed the idea that busyness was evidence of value. If the diary was full, the work must be important. If the role carried responsibility and status, I must be progressing.
So when I left corporate life, one of the questions underneath all the practical ones was much more personal:
What am I actually capable of outside it?
I knew I had transferable skills. What I wasn’t sure about was whether those skills could produce anything comparable to the productive life I had inside a large organisation — let alone eventually provide a good income.
I was not only questioning my skills. I was questioning the identity I had built around where those skills were valuable.
Two months later, thanks to AI, my view of that has changed considerably.
I had underestimated what one person could do now
I used to think about ideas partly in terms of the resources required to execute them. Who would build it? Who would design it? Who would research it? Who would write it? How much would it cost? Did I know how to do it myself?
Those are still sensible questions, but they are no longer necessarily the first ones.
Now I find myself asking whether the idea is good, whether I understand what I am trying to create, whether I can explain the direction clearly enough and whether I can find the right combination of tools to make it real.
My process does not begin when I open an AI tool. By then, I have usually been carrying the idea around for some time — kicking it around in my head, challenging it, imagining the finished result and working out why I think it matters.
There is already a direction.
The next step is translating that direction into something AI can work with. That is where the brain-dump comes in — not instead of thinking, but to get the detail out of my head.
I explain the purpose, intended outcome, what needs to be included, the tone or structure I want, what I already know, where I am uncertain and where I see the risks. AI helps organise that material, identify gaps, challenge assumptions and turn the direction into something tangible.
Then I react.
And that is where my own role has changed.
I’m still creating. I’m just creating differently.
I have not disappeared from the process. The idea, direction and judgment are still mine.
I decide what feels right, what feels generic, what has misunderstood the intention and what needs another iteration. I notice the detail that does not work, reject things, change direction, add context the technology could not possibly know unless I supplied it, and decide when something is finished.
The difference is that I am less often the person carrying out every piece of the work myself. My role is becoming closer to that of a director.
For years, I associated capability with being able to perform the task myself. Now I see another kind of capability: being able to imagine something clearly, articulate it, direct its development and recognise when the result is good.
Some of what I’m using now was already there
Some of the things helping me most are not new skills at all. They are older parts of me that had simply gone quiet.
I wrote throughout my school years, and I played piano from a young age and continued with music through school. Then corporate life became dominant.
Those interests did not disappear because I stopped caring about them. They simply stopped having much space.
For years, my professional identity received most of the attention. Now those older abilities are resurfacing in different forms.
Writing has become central to how I communicate ideas through JB Reinvent. Music has returned through creating tracks, shaping lyrics and developing audio and video.
And the underlying ability never entirely left.
I still know when a sentence lands properly. I still have a musical ear. I still know when something sounds wrong, when a rhythm needs changing or when a piece of writing is technically fine but somehow lifeless.
AI can generate options, but it cannot replace the fact that I know what I am listening for.
Sometimes the most transferable skills are not the ones listed on your CV.
They are the things you loved before your career became the dominant story.
AI has expanded what I can execute, but it has also helped me rediscover what was already there. The writing ability did not begin with AI. Neither did the musical ear, the judgment, the curiosity or the instinct to structure an unclear problem.
What changed was my ability to bring those parts together and turn them into finished things.
My working life already looks very different
Since leaving corporate life, I have used AI as part of building a business from scratch.
It has helped me think through the business model, structure services, develop coaching programmes from my ideas, create workbooks and client tools, shape marketing campaigns, research topics, test assumptions and turn rough concepts into finished material.
A thought can become an article like this one. An idea can become a presentation, a website page, a campaign or a client exercise.
It also helps me orient myself around financial, tax and legal questions, understand what I need to know and recognise where professional advice is still required.
And this is not just happening in my own little experiment. In the OECD’s 2026 Digital for SMEs survey, 61% of the more than 2,000 surveyed businesses across 12 OECD countries reported using AI, with more than half reporting at least moderate gains from it. The OECD rightly cautions that the sample is not representative of every small business, but the direction of travel is difficult to ignore.
There is, however, an important boundary in my own work.
AI can support the administration, research, programme development and materials around coaching, but I do not see it replacing the coaching relationship itself.
When I sit with a client, I am listening to what they say, noticing what sits underneath it, responding to what emerges, asking the next question and offering encouragement. That human exchange is central to the experience.
AI can help me build the environment around the work. It does not replace the relationship at the centre of it.
More recently, I have also used AI to produce audio, music and video. What began as another way of communicating ideas for the business has spilled into my personal life and uncovered a genuine enjoyment of directing and creative production.
I have not suddenly acquired twenty new professional qualifications. What has changed is my access to execution.
Just as importantly, I have regained access to parts of myself I had stopped using.
Some of the limits we place on ourselves may simply be out of date
This is where I think the conversation about AI becomes more interesting than productivity.
There is already good evidence that productivity gains are real. In one controlled experiment involving 453 professionals completing writing tasks, access to ChatGPT reduced average completion time by around 40% while increasing the quality of the resulting work by 18%.
Those numbers matter.
But they are not the part I find most interesting.
Saving time is useful. Changing what you believe you are capable of attempting is potentially much bigger.
If you have spent twenty years thinking that you could not build something, write something, make a video, start a business or create a course without a designer, developer, marketing team or specialist support, some of those assumptions may still be true.
But some may simply be out of date.
For many of the things I now create, the cost of producing a first version is far lower than I once assumed. You can explore before committing, prototype before hiring and create before knowing every technical detail of how creation used to happen.
That does not mean expertise no longer matters, professional advice becomes unnecessary or AI automatically produces good work.
If anything, being able to generate more makes judgment more important.
Knowing what good looks like
As execution becomes easier to access, knowing what good looks like becomes more valuable.
AI can produce quickly, but somebody still needs to know what should exist, what is wrong, what is missing, what needs another iteration and when to stop.
Judgment, taste and experience matter. So does knowing what question to ask and recognising when the answer is weak.
AI has not made me irrelevant to my own work. It has made my contribution more concentrated.
My value increasingly sits in the idea, the context, the direction, the standards and the decisions, while the technology helps with much of the labour between them.
Perhaps that is why this feels so transformative.
And this is where AI became a reinvention story for me
A lot of us built our idea of what was possible using the world as it existed when we made the decision.
You may have dismissed an ambition because you did not have the skills, the money, the team or the time, or because pursuing it appeared to require abandoning the security of the life you had already built.
Those were legitimate considerations.
But the environment has changed.
If the practical limits have changed, some of the conclusions you reached about your own future may deserve another look.
There is another question worth asking too: which parts of yourself did you put on hold while you built the life you have now?
Maybe you used to write, play music, draw, teach, build things, perform, design, organise people or tell stories.
Perhaps those interests did not disappear. Perhaps the life you built simply stopped making room for them.
Not every passion needs to become a business, and not every idea deserves to be pursued. AI is not a substitute for expertise, responsibility or human judgment.
But something you once classified as not realistic for someone like me may now have a surprisingly low-cost first step.
Because sometimes we do not feel stuck because we have no options.
We feel stuck because we are still evaluating our options using an old version of what we believe is possible — and perhaps an incomplete version of who we are.
Perhaps the first question isn’t “What should I do next?”
It might be: what have I already dismissed?
What did you want before practicality took over? Which parts of yourself have gone quiet? Which abilities have you assumed only make sense inside your current profession? What would you try if producing the first version no longer required permission, a team or a large budget?
And who might you become if some of the practical barriers you built your identity around were suddenly smaller?
Those are the kinds of questions behind Identity Builds Reinvention™ and my Signature Programme at JB Reinvent™.
If you feel stuck in a role that no longer fits, or you have ideas and ambitions you have quietly written off as unrealistic, this is exactly the territory I work on through JB Reinvent™.
The Signature Programme helps you understand what has shaped your current identity, rediscover possibilities you may have pushed aside and build a practical blueprint for who you want to become next.
AI can expand the range of things you could build. Reinvention starts with deciding what is actually worth building for you.
AI may help you build some of what comes next.
But first, you need to know what you want it to help you build.
That requires something technology cannot do on your behalf: knowing yourself.
That part is still yours, and perhaps it is more valuable than ever.
—
I explore my own journey from a successful corporate career towards a wider idea of what my life could contain in Who Am I Allowed to Become? — Identity, ambition and the life we give ourselves permission to build.
You can explore the book and the JB Reinvent™ Signature Programme at jb-reinvent.com.
And I’d be interested in your answer to this:
What part of yourself did you put aside because the life you built had no obvious place for it?
And if the practical barriers are now smaller, is it worth looking again?