EY’s $100M investment in human judgment
The last weekend in August (2026), I published my latest work on tech fluency for the modern workforce: what it means, where organizations are getting it wrong, and what it’s costing them.
Within 48 hours, EY put $100 million behind the answer.
EY is earmarking bonuses for employees who excel at “human” skills like innovation and judgment, the things AI can’t replicate. And the market is already showing why.
AI was sold as an answer to a scaling problem. Delivering more capability in more hands brings more value.
But value to whom?
Because when you scale the doing, the doing stops being scarce.
And when the doing stops being scarce, the thing that becomes valuable is what was always underneath it: reasoning, judgment, perception, attention, and the ability to translate those into something that matters.
What we’re already seeing is that the people who stood out before AI will continue to stand out. Why? Not because they learned AI faster, but because their core value was never just about the functional skills.
It turns out scaling the doing doesn’t replace the need for those things. It makes them more expensive.
EY just put a price tag on that realization. The question is whether your organization has figured it out yet.
The picture of what an AI-enabled workforce looks like is becoming more complete one puzzle piece at a time.