By Beijing Daily

Kai-Fu Lee, founder and CEO of 01.AI and chairman of Sinovation Ventures, recently launched his new book, The AI Future Is Here: Dividends of the Era for CEOs, Organizations, and Individuals (AI未来已来：CEO、组织、个人的时代红利), at the Chengze Forum hosted by the National School of Development at Peking University (PKU NSD). Speaking with the media, he said that artificial intelligence will hold the upper hand in every field that involves data, while human value will increasingly lie in domains that emphasize intuitive thinking, emotional connection, and interpersonal interaction.

Technology, Lee said, is unquestionably the future of the world — and of China. AI stands out as the most important field in the current wave of technological development, revolutionizing every industry, while robotics, semiconductors, embodied AI, biomedicine, quantum computing, and other fields have also made advances unimaginable just a decade ago.

If AI is already smarter than humans, what should humans do next? Lee believes plenty of paths remain open. First, people should strive — for themselves or for their children — to become responsible individuals who can be held accountable, and can therefore be trusted to manage AI. Second, do what you genuinely love, because that is the only way to do it well. Third, learn to use AI well and let it assist you in your work.

For exceptionally talented young people who aspire to build the next ByteDance or Google, he added, it is vital to cherish and harness the power of the "right brain" — intuitive, creative thinking — because AI outperforms humans in "left brain" functions but possesses no "right brain" of its own. The iPhone, reusable rockets, and ChatGPT, he noted by way of example, were all breakthroughs that AI models could never have produced on their own.

For the broader public, Lee offered four suggestions. First, move toward fields with little or no data, because humans cannot outcompete AI in any data-rich domain. Second, move toward open-ended fields rather than closed ones — in any closed domain, AI will simply overwhelm humans. A factory assembly line, for instance, is a closed domain, whereas repairing air conditioners or plumbing is open-ended, because it requires navigating varied and unpredictable environments. Third, blue-collar jobs centered on physical labor still offer abundant opportunities, because embodied AI robots are not yet nearly as capable as AI models.

Kai-Fu Lee

"The last suggestion is in fact the most important: move toward human relationships. People, in the end, will not place their trust in machines and AI. If you are entrusting your future, your safety, or your children to someone, you will only ever entrust them to a person — not to a robot. The trust, care, and even affection that people build with one another can never be replaced by AI. Nurses, teachers, and tour guides, for example, all do care-centered work."

He went on to cite further examples: in the corporate world, key account sales will always require relationship-building. In insurance and real estate sales, for instance, people will likely feel for a long time to come that these are transactions that ought to happen face to face. In the age of AI, qualities and soft skills — emotional intelligence, communication, the ability to inspire trust, and team spirit — become more valuable than ever.