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Why High-Agency People Are Better at Adopting AI
May 26, 2025
High-agency people thrive with AI not because they know more, but because they act faster, testing, iterating, and creating value before others even start.
High-agency people thrive with AI not because they know more, but because they act faster, testing, iterating, and creating value before others even start.
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” - Alan Kay
In the race to adopt AI tools, it’s not technical know-how or role seniority that separates the early winners from the laggards, it’s agency.
High-agency people, the ones who make things happen, who don’t wait for permission, who default to action, are the ones getting disproportionate returns from AI. Not because they’re technical experts, but because they move quickly, testing ideas, learning fast, and adjusting as they go.
High agency is the belief that you can shape your environment rather than be shaped by it. It's a mindset that says: "I might not have all the answers, but I’ll figure it out. I’ll try, and I’ll improve."
This mindset translates beautifully into the world of AI, where tools are changing fast, documentation is inconsistent, and the best use cases are often hidden behind experimentation.
Low-agency people wait for training. High-agency people open AI tools and start testing prompts.
At its core, working with AI is an engineering problem.
High-agency engineers already think this way. But increasingly, high-agency marketers, operators, customer success leads, legal teams, and finance folks are learning to adopt the same playbook.
AI isn’t just a “technical” wave. Its biggest gains will come from non-technical teams who learn to apply it in operational, creative, and strategic ways.
These are the people who are reshaping how work gets done. The multiplier isn’t in the tool, it’s in the mindset. Naturally, there are data privacy, ethics and compliance concerns to discuss and understand, but I won’t be covering them in this piece.
If only your engineering and product teams think like this, you’re leaving huge value on the table.
One of the great illusions in this wave of AI adoption is that some people are naturally good at it and others are not. That’s not true.
The difference is a willingness to explore without certainty. Most people are still waiting for a perfect interface, a certified training program, or a permission slip from their manager. High-agency people are already on their tenth experiment.
They become builders and not just users!
If you're building a team today, especially in fast-moving environments, hire for agency. Teach the tools, but screen for the mindset.
You can always train someone to use Claude or Gemini (or to discover other tools for that matter). You can't easily teach someone to default to action, or to debug their way through the messiness and ambiguity of AI-powered workflows.
When AI is integrated deeply into your team’s daily problem-solving muscle, not just in code, but in thinking, you create compounding leverage.
High-agency people don’t wait to be told what to do, they decide what to do. They aren’t paralysed by ambiguity; they move through it. That mindset is the superpower in this new era of AI.
And here’s the truth I challenge others with:
There are no adults, not even AI (yet at least…)
There’s no one coming to tell us the “right” way to use these tools. No instruction manual that accounts for your unique context. No perfectly optimised prompt that someone else will write for you.
We’re all experimenting in real time (and it’s pretty fun!). That’s why high agency matters more than ever.
The people who thrive in this moment are the ones who:
The ones making headway aren’t sitting back for the next release; they’re building today, knowing tomorrow’s tools will be even better.
