They Didn’t Disappear

The entire professional world was built around doing more. The question was never “what should we build?” It was “can you deliver it?”. That era is ending.

I'm Mark Strefford. I run Reimagined Industries, a AI-native firm in Manchester. You might have found me through LinkedIn, Instagram, or someone sharing one of these posts. I write about what happens when AI agents make real decisions, why most enterprise AI projects fail to deliver what they promise, what it takes to build a company with two people and AI, and what all of this means for the actual humans involved.

For most of our careers, we got rewarded for doing.

Doing more. Doing faster. Doing what was asked, reliably, at scale.

The entire professional world was built around it: job specs, KPIs, billable hours, utilisation rates. The question was never “what should we build?” It was “can you deliver it?”

That era is ending.

Not because doing doesn’t matter. But because AI is becoming exceptionally good at it. The doing is being handled.

Which means the thing that was always undervalued, the creative thinking, the reframing, the “what if we approached this completely differently?” suddenly becomes the most valuable contribution in the room.

We’re moving from a world that rewarded reliable execution to one that rewards original thinking.

And that’s a problem for a lot of organisations. Because they spent decades building cultures that systematically trained creativity out of people. Standardise. Comply. Follow the process.

Now they need the opposite. And they’re looking around wondering where all the creative thinkers went.

They didn’t disappear. They just stopped volunteering ideas that nobody wanted to hear.