The Last Thing AI Cannot Do Is the First Thing Your Organisation Should Protect

When capability becomes a commodity, creativity becomes the only scarce resource. Most organisations are deploying AI in ways that systematically degrade the one thing that will differentiate them.

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Recently at the SuperAI conference in Singapore in June 2026, Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, made an observation that cuts through the noise of the AI jobs debate with unusual precision. “We have a real commoditisation on capability and intelligence,” he said, “which means that the skill has to be about creativity and coordination.” The superpower of AI is that it can code everything, he noted, and its coding capability will eventually surpass that of humans. When that happens, the question of what distinguishes one organisation from another is no longer answered by access to technical capability. It is answered by something that technical capability cannot produce.

That observation is not a consoling story about human uniqueness. It is a structural economic argument about where value migrates when a fundamental input to knowledge work becomes abundant. And it has an implication that most organisations have not yet drawn: if creativity is the last scarce resource in an AI-commoditised economy, the organisations that are systematically degrading human creative capacity through how they deploy AI are making a strategic error of the first order.

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND

The economic logic of commoditisation has played out consistently across previous technological transitions. When steel became cheap, competitive advantage migrated to product design. When bandwidth became cheap, it migrated to content. When computing power became cheap, it migrated to software. The pattern is consistent: when a scarce resource becomes abundant, the value in the system reorganises around whatever the abundant resource was previously constrained by. AI is making cognitive capability abundant. The question that follows — what was cognitive capability constrained by? — points directly to creativity, judgment, and the coordination of human effort toward purposes that cannot be specified in advance.

Siu’s argument from Singapore is this pattern applied to intelligence itself. AI can code. AI can analyse. AI can synthesise, summarise, and generate at a pace and scale no human can match. What it cannot do is originate — cannot start from genuine curiosity, make the unexpected connection, feel the emotional resonance of an idea, or decide that the problem being solved is not the right problem. Those are creative capacities, and they are the ones that become scarce precisely when everything else becomes abundant. Siu put it directly: “We’re born creative, and we’re losing our creativity to fit into a system because we’re trying to be turned into machines and do actions that are sort of regular.”

The research supports his diagnosis. A January 2025 peer-reviewed study published in Societies found a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, mediated by increased cognitive offloading — the tendency to delegate reasoning to AI rather than exercising it independently. A 2025 MIT study found that participants who exclusively used AI for cognitive tasks showed weaker brain connectivity, lower memory retention, and cognitive declines that persisted after AI use stopped. A May 2026 paper published in ScienceDirect introduced the concept of AI-chatbots-induced cognitive atrophy — the measurable deterioration of critical thinking and decision-making capacity through excessive AI dependence.

INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS

There is a paradox at the centre of current AI deployment strategy that Siu’s observation makes visible. Organisations are adopting AI to enhance their capability, and in doing so, many are inadvertently degrading the one capability that AI cannot replicate. The translators correcting mediocre AI output for a fraction of their former pay are not becoming more creative. The warehouse workers whose every movement is surveilled by algorithmic management systems are not developing better judgment. The knowledge workers who ask AI to generate options before they have formed their own view are not building stronger analytical capacity. They are, in each case, performing the cognitive equivalent of having someone else do their push-ups for them.

Siu’s argument from Singapore is the same observation from the optimist’s position: if we stop losing our creativity to systems that require us to behave like machines, AI can free us to be more fully human. Both framings arrive at the same strategic implication for organisations. The deployment model matters. The question of whether AI is being used to augment creative human work or to substitute routine human compliance for creative judgment is not a philosophical distinction. It is the distinction between an AI strategy that preserves competitive advantage and one that erodes it.

The economic stakes of that distinction are significant. When Siu describes a commoditisation of capability and intelligence, he is describing a world in which the technical skills that most organisations have spent decades and significant resources developing — coding, analysis, financial modelling, data processing, legal research — become available to any organisation with access to an AI tool and the compute to run it. In that world, the organisation whose people are more creative, more able to make unexpected connections, more capable of genuine originality in problem-framing and solution-generation, has a genuine and durable advantage. The organisation whose AI deployment has gradually subordinated human judgment to algorithmic task management has built a faster, cheaper version of a capability that is rapidly being commoditised — and has nothing distinctive left.

IMPLICATIONS

The governance implication for boards and executives is specific and uncomfortable. Most AI strategy conversations focus on deployment speed, efficiency gains, cost savings, and risk management. Almost none of them include a serious evaluation of what the deployment model is doing to human creative capacity over time — whether the specific ways AI is being used in the organisation are augmenting or degrading the judgment, originality, and creative engagement of the people performing the work.

That evaluation requires asking three questions that most AI impact assessments do not currently address. The first is whether the tasks being automated are the routine, repetitive ones below the threshold of what makes the work creative, or whether they include the cognitive challenges that develop judgment and build capability in the people performing them. The second is whether the people working alongside AI in your organisation are using it to extend their own thinking — to test, challenge, and develop their ideas — or to replace their thinking, receiving AI-generated outputs as starting points they then accept rather than originate. The third is whether your organisation is measuring, however approximately, what AI deployment is doing to the creative output, intellectual engagement, and original thinking of the workforce, or whether the only metrics being tracked are the efficiency ones.

Siu also names coordination as the second scarce skill alongside creativity, and it deserves attention that it rarely receives. The ability to align people around shared purpose, build trust across difference, navigate conflict productively, and produce genuine collective action is not only a human skill that AI cannot replicate. It is the skill that determines whether an organisation can do anything useful with the creative individuals it has — whether their ideas survive contact with institutional reality and become the things that differentiate the organisation in the market. Developing coordination capacity deliberately, rather than assuming it will emerge from shared tools and common processes, is a leadership investment that the AI era makes more important, not less.

CLOSING TAKEAWAY

The history of technological commoditisation suggests that the organisations that prosper in each transition are not the ones that optimise most aggressively for the newly abundant resource. They are the ones that redirect their attention and investment toward whatever that resource was previously constraining — the new scarce thing that the abundance has revealed. AI is making intelligence abundant. The new scarce thing is human creativity. The organisations that understand this and protect it, develop it, and deploy AI in ways that augment rather than erode it will have the advantage that was once provided by access to better information, better analysis, and better technical capability.

Those advantages are being commoditised. Creativity is not. The last thing AI cannot do is the first thing your organisation should protect.

Johan Steyn is a prominent AI thought leader, speaker, and author with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence’s impact on business and society. He is passionate about ethical AI development and its role in shaping a better future. Find out more about Johan’s work at https://www.aiforbusiness.net