In 2016, the world watched as Google’s AlphaGo made what’s now known as “Move 37” against Lee Sedol, the world Go champion.
The move was so unexpected, so brilliant, that commentators called it impossible.
Sedol stared at the board in visible shock.
For the first time in his decorated career, he realized something profound and terrifying: this machine had just outthought him.
Last week, Paul Roetzer stood on stage at the Marketing AI Conference (MAICON) and delivered a keynote that brought that 2016 moment into sharp focus for today’s knowledge workers.
As founder and CEO of SmarterX and the Marketing AI Institute, Roetzer has made it his mission to accelerate AI literacy and human-centered AI transformation in organizations.
His talk, “The Move 37 Moment for Knowledge Workers,” argued that the moment Sedol experienced—when a master confronts something that exceeds their expertise—is no longer confined to championship Go matches.
It’s arriving for knowledge workers everywhere.
I’m in full agreement with Roetzer’s assessment, so I decided to use my own custom AIs to translate what this moment means for the millions of knowledge workers facing their own Move 37.
Because this is the calm before the storm. Your Move 37 moment is coming. Maybe it’s already here.
The question isn’t whether AI will surpass you at tasks that define your professional identity—it’s how you’ll respond when it does.
This isn’t the end of human expertise. It’s an invitation to transcend it—to evolve from performer to orchestrator, from optimizer to innovator, from task expert to collaborative genius.
The Acceleration Is Real—and Relentless
Before we explore how to navigate this transformation, we need to understand its scope and speed.
AI isn’t improving linearly. It’s getting ten to one hundred times smarter and cheaper every single year through exponential growth that shows no signs of slowing.
We’re rapidly progressing through what OpenAI calls the stages of AI development, currently moving toward Level 4—innovation.
At this innovation stage, AI won’t just execute our ideas faster. It will generate ideas we haven’t conceived.
This is when AI truly becomes a game-changer for knowledge workers.
The economic stakes are staggering. The United States has roughly 100 million knowledge workers representing approximately $11 trillion in annual wages.
Frontier AI models already approach expert-level quality while working one hundred times faster at one-hundredth the cost.
As Roetzer details in the talk, the impacts are already visible:
Ford’s CEO predicts AI will replace half of all white-collar workers.
IBM replaced hundreds of HR roles.
Microsoft saved over $500 million in call centers alone.
Amazon’s CEO noted they will reduce total corporate workforce.
Walmart expects headcount to stay flat despite growth plans.
The big question business leaders are asking isn’t academic anymore:
“Would I hire an AI agent instead of a human for this role?”
This isn’t speculation about a distant future. It’s economic pressure forcing radical transformation within the next one to two years.
1st Shift: From Competitor to Collaborator
When your Move 37 moment arrives—when you realize AI does something central to your identity better than you do—you face an existential choice.
You can give in to the fear and anxiety. You can resist, deny, or retreat.
That path leads to obsolescence.
Or you can choose growth. You can lean into the discomfort and evolve.
That path leads to transformation.
The key is reframing how you see AI. This isn’t human versus machine. It’s human plus machine.
AI isn’t here to replace human creativity and potential—it’s here to unlock capabilities that were previously impossible.
Consider what happened after Lee Sedol was devastated in losing to AlphaGo three games in a row. He didn’t give up. He studied the machine, learned from it, and returned in game four to make Move 78—an acclaimed “god move” that exposed a weakness in the AI’s seemingly perfect play.
His humanness wasn’t diminished by competing against this creation. It was expanded, and he won.
That’s the promise waiting on the other side of fear. When you stop competing with AI and start collaborating with it, you don’t become less human. You become more human.
You gain superpowers—higher value, greater productivity, increased earning potential—precisely because you’re focused on what only humans can do while AI handles what it does best.
The professionals who resist this collaboration will be displaced. Not by AI directly, but by other humans who learned to work alongside it.
The paradox is profound: the more we embrace AI as our partner, the more uniquely human our contribution becomes.
So start small. Identify one area where AI already outperforms you. Instead of avoiding it, experiment with collaboration. That’s where your transformation begins.
2nd Shift: From Optimization to Innovation
For decades, corporate strategy focused on incremental improvement. Make things 10% better. Cut costs by 10%. Increase efficiency by 10%.
That era is over.
When AI is improving exponentially—not incrementally—linear thinking becomes a death sentence. The choice before every organization is stark: disrupt yourself or be disrupted.
This demands “10x thinking” rather than “10% thinking.”
10% thinking is optimization. It’s making existing processes better, faster, cheaper. It’s essential for operations, but insufficient for survival when competitors like OpenAI can come out of nowhere to challenge even Google’s search monopoly with AI-powered alternatives.
10x thinking is innovation. It’s creating entirely new forms of value. New products. New markets. New processes that make previously impossible things routine.
Consider a research firm that traditionally took months to complete deep industry analysis. With AI, they’re reimagining what research could look like—delivering comprehensive insights in days instead of months.
It’s not optimization. It’s transformation.
The shift requires asking different questions. Not “How can I do this better?” but “What should I be doing instead?” Not “How do I improve my current role?” but “What can I change, reinvent, or transform in my team or department?”
This is what it means to be “AI forward”—embracing the uncertainty and complexity of this moment to pioneer new territory with a human-centered, responsible approach.
Here’s the crucial distinction: the goal isn’t to squeeze more work from people at lower cost.
It’s to enable people to create three times the value while potentially working less—paying them more for their expanded capabilities rather than forcing them into sixty-hour weeks doing tasks AI could handle.
Innovation makes the unthinkable possible. The question is whether you’ll lead it or be left behind by it.
3rd Shift: From Operator to Orchestrator
For most of your career, your value was defined by what you knew how to do. Your expertise was measured in tasks mastered, processes perfected, outputs delivered.
AI is making task-based expertise obsolete.
As AI approaches expert level across most cognitive tasks, knowing how to do something matters less than knowing what to do and why.
The future belongs to orchestrators, not operators. This requires developing an entirely new skill set:
AI literacy is now the fastest growing skill that’s appearing in LinkedIn job requirements—understanding how to orchestrate custom AI tools is quickly becoming table stakes.
Critical thinking becomes essential for evaluating AI outputs and determining strategic direction.
Emotional intelligence emerges as the irreplaceable human differentiator—connection, empathy, and motivation remain firmly human.
Curiosity drives competitive advantage—asking better questions unlocks AI’s deepest potential.
Adaptability matters more than any specific skill because the landscape keeps shifting.
The role is evolving from executing tasks to directing AI capabilities. From performing to conducting. From knowing answers to knowing what questions unlock the most value.
Organizations must commit to reskilling their workforce now. Those who master this collaboration will gain exponential advantages.
The gap between adopters and resisters will widen dramatically—and quickly.
What to Do Tomorrow
For individual contributors, the path forward starts with action:
Identify your Move 37 moment—acknowledge where AI already outperforms you. Then:
Start one AI collaboration and build a custom AI to assist you.
Practice 10x thinking: what becomes possible if current constraints disappear?
Invest in AI literacy through courses, experimentation, and discussion with your peers.
For leaders, the opportunity AND responsibility is greater. Your playbook is to:
Bring in external AI coaches (like us) for workshops and ongoing support.
Appoint internal champions who can provide leadership and guidance.
Create psychological safety for experimentation and prioritize learning over results.
Celebrate AI innovation by recognizing those who find creative applications.
Focus budgets on growth and innovation, not just optimization and productivity.
The three mindset shifts require daily practice, and organizations must commit to reimagining and reskilling now.
It’s time to embrace discomfort as evidence of growth, and view every AI advancement as expanding your potential rather than limiting it.
The key question is no longer, “How can I do this better?”, but rather: “What should I be doing instead?”
It’s Your Move 78 Moment
The stakes are clear. Those who cling to task-based expertise face displacement—not from AI, but from other humans who learned to orchestrate it.
The gap between adopters and resisters will become unbridgeable.
This isn’t fear-mongering. It’s economic reality driven by market pressure, exponential technology growth, and competitive dynamics that spare no one.
But here’s the invitation buried in the threat:
Your Move 37 moment reveals where AI surpasses you at specific tasks.
Your Move 78 moment—the one you’re being called to make right now—reveals where you surpass AI at directing that power toward meaningful human ends.
Like Lee Sedol, you have an opportunity to make your “God Move”.
This is humanity’s chance to make the brilliant counterattack.
To show that our value isn’t in competing with machines at computational tasks, but in bringing wisdom, purpose, creativity, and meaning to work that matters.
Just as master cloth weavers evolved from laborers to designers and orchestrators when mechanized looms arrived, knowledge workers must evolve from task executors to strategic directors of AI capabilities.
Imagine millions of knowledge workers making this shift and transcending current limitations.
Using AI to amplify human creativity, purpose, and impact beyond anything we can currently imagine.
Let’s build a future that’s not just more intelligent, but more human.
The choice before you is clear:
Resist and diminish, OR collaborate and expand.
Optimize incrementally, OR innovate exponentially.
Cling to tasks, OR orchestrate possibilities.
The transformation is happening with or without you. Your response determines whether you lead or lag.
Start today. Find one key area to collaborate with AI. Choose growth over fear.
This is your Move 78 moment. Make it count.
Postscript: Practicing What I Preach
I’m facing my own Move 37 moment when I publish these articles.
I used to pride myself on writing my own thoughtful AI commentary. But why am I competing with AI at the tasks it does better, instead of orchestrating it to amplify what I do best—which is synthesizing ideas and connecting them to practical action?
So I made my God Move 78 and started using all the best AI tools I could find to brainstorm, research, write, and promote my AI essays.
For this article, I watched Paul Roetzer’s keynote while puttering around the house on Sunday night. I was inspired and still thinking about it Monday morning, so I uploaded the video into Google’s NotebookLM to extract the key insights. Then I fed those notes into a custom AI Project in Claude (the best AI writer currently available) with specific instructions about tone, structure, and messaging aligned with my voice. After massaging the outline with Claude, it drafted the article, and I made only minimal edits. Voila!
To help promote the article, I asked NotebookLM to automatically create this explainer video, a great new feature I didn’t even know existed. And then I went to the ChatGPT custom AI I use for my Coachfully.AI business to write an email to my list, and promotional snippets for social media.
What would have taken me days of focused work was completed in hours—and the quality is higher than I could have produced alone.
Plus, I thoroughly enjoyed the process, doing the things that I enjoy doing, while the AI does the rest.
Ultimately, AlphaGo made Lee Soder better at his craft, and it’s the same with me. Now it’s your turn.
By the way, there’s an award winning documentary about Lee Soder vs AlphaGo that’s available to watch on YouTube. It’s fantastic!
A brilliant reframing of AI disruption as a catalytic moment of human expansion —what I call the “Atlantis Window”—a threshold not of decline, but for conscious evolution. It challenges everyone to reclaim their sovereignty, lean into curiosity rather than fear, and step into their most human capacities: creativity, discernment, and purpose. This challenge is our opportunity to move from creator to cocreator, and make our sovereign transformative “move” not just to survive or succumb to machines operationally, but to lead with change-the-world level meaning and redefine our vision for human potential.