The Human Qualities Spectrum in Practice: The List She Was Afraid to Make
- Jeff Abbott
- Jul 10
- 3 min read
Renata has run marketing at a mid-size consumer brand in São Paulo for eleven years — long enough to remember when writing the campaign copy herself was the job, not a quaint detail of it. This year, her team’s AI tools started producing work the client couldn’t tell from her team’s. Then came the quarter when a junior with eighteen months’ experience, working with the tools, outperformed a senior with twelve years. She said out loud, in an AI Salon conversation, the thing many people are only saying to themselves: “If it can do the work I’m proudest of, what exactly am I for?”
Chapter 3 of the book offers a tool for precisely this moment — not a pep talk, but an exercise: the Human Qualities Spectrum. List ten activities that define your work. Place each on a spectrum from Replicable (what AI can master) through Relational (what requires human presence) to Transcendent (what emerges from having something at stake). Be honest — that’s the whole discipline of it.
Renata made her list on a Sunday, at the kitchen table, and later said the first surprise was how much she didn’t want to.
Her ten, where she placed them
Replicable: campaign copywriting · media planning · performance reporting · competitive analysis · A/B test design
Relational: the call with a client whose launch just failed · mentoring the two juniors who will outgrow her · reading which of the founder’s “suggestions” are actually orders · negotiating with the agency she’s worked with for a decade
Transcendent: deciding what the brand will refuse to do for money
The arithmetic stung. Five of her ten — including the three she’d have called her signature skills — sat on the left, where the machines improve every quarter.
I have spent eleven years getting better at the part of my job that is easiest to replicate — and calling it my value.
But the Spectrum’s insight is not the sting; it’s what the sting redirects. The tool is explicit that this is not a hierarchy — the left side still needs doing, and doing well. The question is where you invest your development energy. Renata’s answers had been clustering left out of habit and pride. Her calendar told the same story: hours refining copy the tools now drafted in minutes, while the mentoring happened in leftover time and the client-crisis calls were treated as interruptions to the “real work.”
So she rebalanced — not her résumé, her attention. The copy and the reports went to the tools, with her editing. The hours that came back went to the middle and the right of her list: she formalized the mentoring she’d been doing accidentally, took the client-relationship dinners she’d been declining, and pushed the refuse-to-do-it conversation with the founder that she’d been postponing for two years — the one about a category of advertising the brand had drifted into that she believed cheapened it. That conversation, she notes, is the only item on her list no tool could have had, because no tool has anything at stake.
Nothing about her title changed. What changed is that when the next quarterly review celebrated the AI-assisted output, she wasn’t threatened by it — it was her leverage now, not her rival. The left side of the spectrum had become what it should have been all along: the part of the job she conducts rather than performs.
Renata is a composite — drawn from conversations with marketing leaders in AI Salon gatherings in Brazil and elsewhere, with details changed. The Sunday-kitchen-table reluctance, we suspect, will feel familiar.
Try it yourself
Ten activities, one honest hour, three zones. Notice where you cluster — and notice, without flinching, whether your pride and your development energy are parked on the side of the spectrum where the machines improve fastest. Then move the energy, not the pride.
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