AI and the Human Premium

The Big Story: The New Cool Thing — Being Human

“This is the paradox of living in a digital age. Human beings have more prestige than ever — and they get it just by showing up. This might even be the hot new career path — ready made for curators, concierges, caregivers, conversationalists, and other people who love people. Welcome to the lovely new economy where humans actually matter. Go ahead, try it out. Be cool — be a human.”

The Rising Value of Presence

By David Jarrard

3-minute read

The more artificial intelligence surrounds us, the more tangible human presence becomes premium.

The signals are pinging all over our radar.

There’s a little bookstore in Alabama that insists every author of every book they sell shows up to sign their works — and customers travel cross-country for the privilege of the inked signature. They can’t keep up with the orders.

“Our books don’t cost more,” The Alabama Booksmith owner Jacob Reiss told The New Yorker. “But they are worth more.”

More evidence? Vinyl records keep spinning back into relevance. Livestreams draw massive audiences because they are imperfect and unedited, their unmistakable humanity “a refuge from the growing glut of AI-generated content,” said Adweek.

There’s a lesson for our industry here. It’s about our evolution into tomorrow’s preferred healthcare experience.

Leaders who balance AI’s formidable power with authentic human connection will win the future. Get it wrong and lose.

The key is to have both humans and AI perform “at the top of their license,” doing the things at which each is best and the things patients need and hunger for the most.

Scarcity drives value. In a digital age flooded with synthetic fluency and machine productivity, human presence becomes the prize.

Our new balancing act

Newsrooms are running a version of this experiment in real time.

Some papers, like the Cleveland Plain Dealer, use AI to draft articles from reporters’ notes. The humans gather the information; the AI writes the story — assigning meaning to the human-collected facts.

“We publish news, not poetry,” snipped Chris Quinn, the newspaper’s editor, (whom we assume is a human).

But other papers such as The Philadelphia Inquirer are using AI to scan city budgets and meeting transcripts — surfacing anomalies, patterns and leads (things AI does well) while humans decide what matters, how to investigate it and tell the tale. This is the way.

Light bulbs and candles

For all the real and imagined angst about AI, the divide isn’t between humans and machines. It’s between organizations that use AI to replace judgment and those that use it to deepen the intelligence that enables better human judgment.

AI is extraordinarily good at gathering and synthesizing. That’s true in journalism. It’s even more true in healthcare.

Algorithms can scan charts, flag risk, suggest diagnoses and draft documentation at scale. AI can spot patterns and reference a global treasure of research no individual clinician could reasonably hold in memory.

Used this way, AI is not a threat to our mission of care. It’s a breakthrough teetering into the territory of a miracle.

Consider the light bulb, which changed the world. It’s efficient, scalable and brilliant. We don’t reach for candles when we need to illuminate an operating room, a conference table or read an MRI.

But we still light candles. The glow, the flicker, the chemical dance of heat and light, the warmth, the little touch of ancient and sacred fire cannot be replicated. What’s a birthday cake without them?

When something becomes abundant and efficient, we begin to notice and pay for what it cannot replicate.

In a world fully and cheaply lit, we choose candles for the things light bulbs can never do.

The space where meaning happens

If healthcare’s AI gathers, synthesizes and drafts, clinicians may finally recover something scarce: time. The question for leadership is, “What happens to those newfound minutes?”

If the result becomes a demand for higher throughput — more volume, more RVUs — the system grows more “efficient” but even more transactional and impersonal than today. But if it becomes an opportunity for deeper presence with patients, the experience of care changes.

A nurse sitting at the bedside does more than occupy space. Physical presence lowers anxiety, builds trust and improves compliance. A clinician who looks up from the screen is signaling accountability and care. When a physician says, “Here’s what this means for you,” they are translating data into life — into family, work, fear, hope.

Presence and meaning-making converge in this physical space shared between humans. This is where the story of someone’s health is written.

Yes, AI can calculate probabilities across populations. It cannot sit in silence with a frightened patient. It cannot carry moral responsibility. It cannot reassure.

You know who can.

And as AI becomes the lightbulb of modern healthcare — illuminating and efficient — the candle will not disappear. Its light will become even more dear.

The future of healthcare is not either/or; it’s both/and. It’s analogue and digital. It’s illuminated and warm. It’s all in the balance.

Leaders who understand this — who design systems where AI amplifies judgment and frees caregivers to practice well — will have a singular competitive advantage.

Be the handwritten note

There’s a reason The Alabama Booksmith in Birmingham can’t keep up with orders.

“So many people travel from out-of-town to visit the store that it has negotiated a discount rate with a local hotel,” wrote Substacker Ted Gioia. “The customers value the human touch in these signed books.”

The human touch? The same is true in healthcare, of course. And as AI advances, it will be truer still.

AI will make care more efficient. It will make care delivery faster and smarter.

But the healthcare systems that use that power to elevate the human experience — to leverage the human premium — will offer something worth more and greatly desired.

They will find that efficiency can scale care, but the human presence defines it.