Since 2019 I have been asking organisations across thirty countries the same thing: are you using AI, or has it started using you? The research runs through interviews, advisory engagements and surveys with leaders in banking, logistics, media, law, professional services, technology and education. It is where the SuperSkills framework comes from, and it is why the book carries evidence rather than opinion.
The Drift Index is an annual reading of organisational judgement: where it is holding, and where it has moved without anyone deciding. The first edition publishes in December 2026.
The first edition is compiling now. If you would like your organisation included, get in touch.
Through interviews, advisory engagements and surveys with leaders across more than 200 organisations in over 30 countries, from 2019 to 2026. The sectors span banking, logistics, media, law, professional services, technology and education. The research base is where the seven SuperSkills framework comes from.
The Drift Index is an annual reading of organisational judgement: where it is holding, and where it has moved without anyone deciding. It draws one senior respondent per organisation and publishes each December, with the first edition in December 2026.
Yes. The first edition is compiling now, with one senior respondent per organisation. Get in touch through the contact page and mention the Index.
No, and it does not claim to be. It is practitioner research: systematic, longitudinal and cross-sector, conducted through direct engagement rather than academic publication. Where the book cites external studies, those citations go to the primary sources.
Yes, with attribution. The drift versus design matrix, synthetic seniority and the other frameworks are published and citable: name the source and link to the original. For commercial licensing, training use or reproduction in publications, get in touch.
The research and essays behind SuperSkills, grouped by theme. Everything here is written, and checkable.
The thesis
Why human capability is the only sustainable AI strategy. Tools commoditise; capability compounds. The foundational argument behind SuperSkills.
Read →Which human skills matter as AI improves, and why "AI-proof jobs" is the wrong frame. What AI can assist, what it can only imitate, and the capabilities that still need human accountability, mapped to the seven SuperSkills.
Read →The seven SuperSkills
The seven human capabilities that decide who thrives as AI absorbs cognitive work, and why they compound while tools commoditise.
Read →Why curiosity is the foundational SuperSkill, how AI erodes it, and what it looks like when it is present or absent in people and organisations.
Read →Why change readiness is a baseline capability, not a crisis skill; how it differs from resilience; and how AI can both support and erode it.
Read →Why the capacity to see systems, second-order effects and long-term patterns decides the quality of judgement, and how AI both extends and threatens it.
Read →Why empathy concentrates in value as AI can simulate it, how it works, where it fails, and why people still want it from humans.
Read →Why global adaptability is a learnable meta-capability, what the evidence shows, and how AI can both amplify and remove the struggle that builds it.
Read →Why innovation without ethical grounding destroys long-term value, what the evidence shows, and why the capacity grows more valuable as technology's power increases.
Read →The culminating SuperSkill: working with AI so it amplifies rather than atrophies human capability, what the evidence shows, and how the partnership succeeds or fails.
Read →Drift, design and judgement
Does AI reduce human judgement? The evidence on critical thinking, cognitive offloading and automation bias, with primary sources, and the distinction at the centre of it: AI can improve an output while weakening the capability that produced it.
Read →Does AI or ChatGPT weaken critical thinking? The evidence, the uncertainty, and the SuperSkills view: it does not disappear, it migrates to verification and thins unless you design against it. With the think-first principle.
Read →The accumulated loss of human knowledge, skill and judgement that builds up when an organisation automates work faster than it redesigns how people learn. Definition, causes, evidence and how to reduce it.
Read →Put human judgement at the beginning of AI-assisted work, not just at the end. The centaur model that beats human-in-the-loop: set intent, framing and boundaries before the machine generates.
Read →Most AI harm comes not from bad actors but from organisations that never made a choice. The drift-versus-design framework, human capability debt, and how to tell where you are.
Read →Why both AI enthusiasm and AI pessimism lead to bad decisions, and how a third posture, grounded in realistic assessment and human capability, outperforms either.
Read →The quiet failure mode of AI-assisted decisions: teams stop thinking and start approving. How to keep humans genuinely in the loop, not just nominally present.
Read →Why automating junior tasks creates a leadership-pipeline risk most organisations miss until it is too late, and how to build new rungs on purpose.
Read →Synthetic seniority is when AI enables junior professionals to produce senior-looking output while the judgement, pattern recognition and contextual wisdom of real seniority has not been built.
Read →AI does not raise the bar for humans so much as remove the reps that made them good in the first place. Why the missed reps are the cost no one is measuring.
Read →Skills as dignity, technology as a stress test, responsibility as inheritance. The SuperSkills Ladder, told through four generations of disruption.
Read →AI in organisations
Change management assumes a known destination, a plannable journey, and resistance as the obstacle. AI breaks all three. What replaces the plan is a quarterly practice.
Read →The recurring challenges leaders face with AI transformation, from tool overwhelm to automation anxiety, and how to map where AI adds value versus where human judgement matters.
Read →Why treating AI readiness as a technology problem builds on a foundation that cannot hold, and the five-link readiness chain, strategy, data, people, process, governance, that actually decides it.
Read →Reference
The vocabulary of drift versus design: capability debt, synthetic seniority, the missing rungs, the Verifier’s Discount and more, defined by Rahim Hirji.
Read →A structured reference to the people building, critiquing, governing and explaining AI. Curated by Rahim Hirji as a resource for professionals who need to know who shapes it.
Read →A gap-mapped approach to AI reading for leadership teams. The Reading Compass, a four-quadrant shortlist, and how to convert reading into shared language and decisions.
Read →Ten years of writing on AI, human capability and the future of work, in my own words. Writing on this since 2019.
Essays · Box of Amazing
How AI became the most sophisticated drift machine ever built, and how to use it without being used by it.
Read →Algorithmic drift: the slow process by which systems start making your choices so smoothly you stop noticing.
Read →What changes when millions of people can build any software they can imagine.
Read →Hope is not a feeling. It is a skill, and it can be practised.
Read →Why AI can make people look senior without the reps that make them senior, and what to do about it.
Read →Ten years of essays and curation, a new one every Sunday. Free.
Browse all →Published elsewhere
On drift, design and staying the author of your own judgement as AI takes over more decisions.
Read → CEOWORLD MagazineWhy most companies mistake activity for transformation, and how to design change on purpose.
Read → The BooksellerWhat publishing, and every knowledge industry, stands to protect or lose as AI reshapes trust.
Read → Irish Tech NewsWhy most AI transformation spend fails to change how people actually work.
Read → EntrepreneurThe real risk is not runaway machines. It is the human judgement we hand over without noticing.
Read → TechRoundWorld Youth Skills Day 2026: the widening gap between what is taught and what the AI-era workplace demands.
Read → The European Business ReviewThe gaps open in leadership decisions, not in the machines. What accountable AI adoption actually requires.
Read → WorldatWorkWhy HR’s next job is designing capability, not managing skills, as AI resets what expertise means.
Read →"The goal isn't more technology. It's more capable humans."Rahim Hirji
A weekly essay and curation on AI, human behaviour and the future of work, written every week for the last ten years and read by more than 25,000 leaders. Prefer less often? Choose the monthly roundup instead. Free either way.
Reading is the backup. The change happens when Rahim is on your stage or working with your leaders. Bring these frameworks into your organisation through a keynote or an advisory engagement.