As organisations move past the early excitement of AI adoption, the conversation is shifting from what the technology can do to what it demands of the people and businesses deploying it. In this interview, Manoj Agarwal, Co-founder of Xoxoday, a global rewards and engagement platform operating across 100+ countries, explains why the next phase of AI will be defined not by the sophistication of the tools, but by the quality of human judgement, business context, and the willingness to rethink how work itself is structured.
There is a lot of optimism around artificial intelligence right now. Do you share it?
Yes, and I will tell you why I am not just saying that to be reassuring. Every major technology shift in history, the industrial revolution, the arrival of computers, the mobile phone era, was met with the same fear: this will destroy jobs, this will displace people, this will break what we have built. And every single time, the opposite happened. Jobs increased. GDP went up. Per capita income rose. When computers arrived in the 1980s, everyone said millions of typists and manual workers would be rendered redundant. What followed was four decades of digital services growth that created far more work than it replaced.
AI is no different in that pattern. My honest view is that about 90% of people will progress with it, and about 10% will not adapt. The 10% is not a technology problem. It is a mindset problem. For those who treat AI as a threat, it will always be a threat. For those who treat it as an opportunity, it will be exactly that.
So AI is simply an opportunity then? No risk involved?
I did not say that. AI is both a risk and an opportunity, and which side you land on depends entirely on the choices you make. For some organisations, AI is disrupting their core business model, not just their workflows. Those companies must change the model itself, not shut down, but fundamentally rethink how they operate. The ones who are agile, who keep making small iterative changes, they keep moving forward. The ones who wait for certainty before acting will find the window has closed.
What I would say to anyone who is still debating whether AI is optional is this: for a company of our size and ambition, AI is simply not optional. And it is not something you phase in over the next few years. Every day right now is a dramatic progression. This is not a linear trend. Urgency is not a word I use lightly, but I use it here.
Everyone is worried about job losses. Is that a legitimate fear?
It is a legitimate question, but it is being framed incorrectly, and that framing is what creates unnecessary fear. AI is displacing jobs. But AI is not displacing work. That is a huge difference, and it is worth sitting with.
A job is narrow by nature. I am a salesperson, I do sales for my entire career, that is my job description. Work is fluid. Today I do sales, tomorrow I do something creative, the day after I am solving a product problem. Going forward, there are no job descriptions. There are work descriptions. AI has already made this shift in categories like design. AI is displacing design jobs, but it has simultaneously created more work for designers who are willing to evolve.
The equation I find useful is simple: work equals effort multiplied by productivity. AI has no impact on effort. Effort is human. What AI does is dramatically increase productivity. So, when productivity goes up, you have two choices. You reduce effort to keep output the same, or you maintain effort and your total output increases. In the world of AI, jobs will reduce and work will increase. The people who understand that distinction and act on it will be fine. The people who use AI as a reason to coast will find themselves in a difficult position.
What will protect people and organisations from being displaced?
Business context. That is the honest answer, and I do not think it gets enough attention.
AI agents, at least for the foreseeable future, are not sitting in client meetings. They are not picking up the phone. They are not reading the room when a deal is about to go sideways. That context lives with human beings. If you understand your client, your market, your competition, and the business you are operating in, you have something an AI cannot replicate. If you do not, then your work is already automatable, and it is only a matter of time.
I see this clearly even within our own teams. A junior developer who writes code without knowing what that code is for, what it sells, what problem it solves for the client, that developer is at genuine risk. Because the code itself can now be written by AI. What cannot be written by AI is the judgement about what to build, why to build it, and how it connects to what the customer needs. That judgement comes from context, and context comes from curiosity and engagement with the business. Orchestration is only as good as the context you bring to it.
For young professionals and early-career employees, what is your practical advice?
Three things. First, go full stack in your thinking. Depth in your role will always matter, but breadth is now essential. If your function gets automated and you have only ever done one thing, you have very little to pivot to. We are all born equal and we acquire skills. If you could acquire a skill at 25, you can acquire one at 35 or 40. The only thing stopping you is the story you tell yourself.
Second, stop thinking in tasks and start thinking in systems. The real leverage is not completing a task faster. It is building something that eliminates the need to do that task manually ever again. Every repeated task in your function is a candidate. Ask yourself not how to do this better, but how to build something that handles it automatically every time.
Third, invest deeply in context and first principles. AI can generate an answer in seconds. What it cannot do is tell you whether that answer is right for your specific client, your market, or your moment. That judgement comes from genuinely understanding the business: who is the customer, what problem are we solving, why does it matter. The professionals who will thrive are not necessarily the most technically proficient. They are the ones who combine AI fluency with real business understanding, because that combination produces judgement, and judgement is the one thing that cannot be automated.
