IkigAI

Four questions

About this exercise

Ikigai (生き甲斐) is a Japanese word for what makes life feel worth living, and the psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya wrote the foundational work on it in 1966. You may know the popular version of the exercise, which asks what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for. We’ve evolved it for the question in front of many of us now: as AI takes on more of the work, what is your irreplaceable contribution in your professional life?

AI is taking on more of the drafting, building, and analysis in how we work. That makes this a good moment to get clear on what stays with people, and with you in particular.

Answer the four questions in a few words or a few sentences each. Your answers can overlap, so repeat yourself where it fits. Then you'll pull them together into one sentence about your irreplaceable contribution. It takes about 15 to 20 minutes.

Your answers are private. Nothing you write is recorded or collected, so the PDF you download at the end is the only copy. Don't forget to download it.

1

AI can now do a lot of the work you might have done yourself. Which parts of your work would you still want to keep?

Think about

  • The last time you lost track of time at work. What were you doing?
  • Work that leaves you with more energy at the end of the day, not less.
See examples
  • Untangling a messy problem across several people and getting them to agree on a path.
  • Sketching early ideas by hand before anything gets built.
  • Working through a hard problem alongside a colleague. I'd hand off the routine parts, not this.
2

AI can produce an answer quickly. Where would you still check it, or decide differently, because of what you know?

Think about

  • A call where you would overrule a confident AI recommendation, and why.
  • What you know about your work, your people, or your context that isn't written down anywhere an AI could read.
  • Where colleagues come to you when the right answer isn't obvious.
See examples
  • Whether something is really ready to go out the door, even when every box is ticked.
  • Whether an AI-suggested draft or design feels right for the people it's meant for.
  • When a tradeoff between speed and risk is worth taking.
3

“The people you serve” can mean customers, clients, users, or colleagues. Even when AI could do the task, where do they still want you, or someone with your expertise, involved?

Think about

  • Moments in your own work when someone wants to be heard, reassured, or walked through a decision.
  • Where a wrong answer in your field would cost trust, not just time.
  • Times people have asked for you, or for “a person,” even when a faster option existed.
See examples (from different fields)
  • A designer: clients want someone to explain why a choice was made, not just receive options.
  • A program lead: stakeholders want a person to own the call when the data points in two directions.
  • A finance analyst: executives want someone to talk through what the numbers mean for them.
4

As AI handles more routine work, where do human judgment, relationships, and creativity change the outcome the most for your team or organization?

Think about

  • A recent result that came down to a person's judgment or a relationship, not the tooling.
  • Where a good human decision is worth far more than faster output.
  • What would suffer first if you or your team stopped doing one particular thing?
See examples
  • Deciding which problem is worth solving before any building starts.
  • Keeping several groups aligned when their priorities conflict.
  • Spotting when an AI output looks right but misses what the customer actually needs.