Gordon Ritter argues AI will amplify human judgment rather than replace workers — the real edge lies in companies capturing how their own teams think and decide.

What happened: Ritter, whose firm outlined the concept of "Coaching Networks" in 2017, contends that recent doomsday predictions about AI displacing half of all white-collar workers and unemployment reaching 20% are measuring the wrong outcome. He points to companies like McKinsey, Bain, EY, Ramp, and Veeva that are embedding AI agents and internal systems to amplify how their employees work, rather than replace them.

Why it matters: AI excels at optimization—finding faster, cheaper paths to a stated goal—but cannot decide which goals are worth pursuing or make judgment calls when no model has a ready answer. Those decisions drive markets and start companies. The durable competitive advantage comes from capturing the traces (records of interactions, corrections, preferences, and edge cases) that encode how your organization actually thinks and decides—intellectual property that competitors cannot simply purchase. Anthropic's August 2025 change to train on consumer chats by default, combined with its February 2026 legal plugins causing Thomson Reuters to drop roughly 18% in a single session, illustrates the risk of letting proprietary decision logic leak into public AI tools.

What to watch: Employees are pasting sensitive data into generative AI tools at scale—77% of employees do this, with 82% of that activity running through personal accounts. The subtler exposure is behavioral: multi-step sessions with AI agents encode your sequencing, priorities, and decision logic, the kind of reasoning a model learns from most readily. Companies that build internal systems to capture their own traces today hold an advantage that competitors starting later cannot simply purchase.