01Prediction
The automation dividend will be worth nothing by 2030.
Cost savings available to every competitor are not an advantage. What your people can do that no one else's can — that is.
AVT Business School · 25 Years · 2001–2026
Impossible
to Replace
A letter to CEOs on pro-worker AI — and a manifesto for the decade in which technology either commodifies your people or makes them more valuable than ever.
Our Position
"You are being sold a future in which your greatest achievement is making your own people unnecessary. We don't buy it."
The most valuable companies of 2035 will not be the ones that removed the most people from their processes. They will be the ones that made their people impossible to replace — by building AI that extends human expertise instead of commodifying it.
This is not sentiment. It is economics. Automation savings are available to every competitor at the price of a subscription — what everyone can buy, no one can win with. Advantage belongs to the organizations that use AI to create new tasks, new services, and new expertise.
The technology does not choose. You do.
One letter. Five parts. Six pages.
- 1
A declaration
where AVT stands, in one page, written to be quoted.
- 2
Seven predictions
what we believe will be true by 2035. Each one debatable. That is the point.
- 3
Five challenges
the uncomfortable conversations every leadership team must have anyway.
- 4
A commitment
five pledges AVT makes publicly, on its 25th anniversary, starting with our own school.
- 5
An invitation
no signature required. Three questions to keep instead.
2026 — 2035
Three of the seven predictions
03Prediction
The companies that automated their juniors will run out of seniors.
Expertise is built at the entry level. Delete the apprentice work and you delete your own pipeline.
06Prediction
Expertise theft will get its Napster verdict.
Training AI on your workers' output and using it to compete against them is this era's music piracy. The legal frameworks will catch up.
The other four are in the letter — including the one about every employee becoming a manager.
The letter ends with three questions, not a call to action.
Question 01
The mirror question.
When your organization talks about AI, does it describe your people as a cost to be reduced — or a capability to be compounded? The strategy is hiding in the vocabulary.
Question 02
The design question.
If AI could do half of every job in your company, what would you want the other half to become? Whoever answers that question — you, a vendor, or nobody — is designing your organization's future.
Question 03
The legacy question.
One day your leadership will be summed up in a single sentence, in a room you are not in. Do you want that sentence to be "they automated faster than anyone" — or "working there made people more valuable than they had ever been"?
If one of these questions follows you home, pass the letter to the person who owns your AI agenda — and ask them the question that stayed.
A manifesto without commitments is a mood. These are ours.
- §We teach the pro-worker design test in every program we run.
- §We redesign our own school by the same standard — and publish what worked and what failed.
- §We bring frontline voice into the boardroom curriculum.
- §We measure ourselves in capability created, not content delivered.
- §We convene the argument annually in Copenhagen — and publish the score, including where we were wrong.
About this letter
"Impossible to Replace" marks AVT Business School's 25th anniversary — a quarter century of teaching executives radical practicality: the refusal to confuse what is fashionable with what works. The letter is signed by Jesper Nytoft Bergmann, CEO & Executive Dean, on behalf of the faculty, members, and alumni of AVT Business School, Copenhagen.
The economic argument draws on Acemoglu, Autor & Johnson, "Building Pro-Worker Artificial Intelligence" (The Hamilton Project, Brookings, February 2026). The convictions, predictions, and commitments are AVT's own.
The future of work is not something that happens to your organization.
It is something you design. Choose out loud.
Download the letter (free PDF)Want to argue it in person? Our door in Copenhagen is open — jnb@avt.dk