Former Havas Global CEO Chris Hirst’s AI-age formula, out 11 June: AI commoditised aptitude; attitude is the only part of the job still worth paying for.
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, June 12, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Chris Hirst, leadership keynote speaker and former Global CEO of Havas Creative Group, published the paperback of Indispensable: The No Bullsh*t Guide to Career Success with Macmillan Business on 11 June 2026, completing the No Bullsh*t trilogy. Hirst cuts against the consensus that executives must learn to use AI before AI replaces them. He argues the opposite: AI has already commoditised the skills, qualifications and output executives spent careers building, and the only part of the job left worth paying for is the part a machine cannot fake.
Hirst prints the conclusion as a five-word formula on page 7: “Career Potential = Attitude x Aptitude.” AI has flattened aptitude, he writes. AI cannot copy attitude. Hirst makes the same point as Golden Rule 10 in the book – “Be world class at the things that require no talent” – because the things that require no talent are also the things AI cannot do.
Hirst uses an airline pilot to carry the argument. “The functional aspects of most jobs are not very difficult and can be rapidly learned,” he writes in Chapter 1. “Even those that require a very high degree of skill quickly become mundane. For nearly everybody on the planet, transporting hundreds of people across the Atlantic in a heavier-than-air steel tube is unimaginable, but for an airline pilot it’s just a job.” AI, in Hirst’s reading, is doing to white-collar work what the jet engine did to long-haul flying: it has not removed the pilot, it has removed the prestige attached to the technical part of the job.
The book also answers the question senior leaders are now putting to every adviser: what will executive teams look like in the AI age? Hirst’s definition does the work: “Indispensable people are those that organisations, clients, customers and teams feel they cannot lose without suffering loss themselves.” On that definition, the AI-age executive team keeps fewer people for what they know and more people for how they operate, because the knowing is now a commodity.
Hirst is direct about the practical risk to candidates and to the executives hiring them. In the book’s “Beware AI” section he writes: “Increasingly, employers are using artificial intelligence to sift through candidates. The reverse is also true – increasingly, candidates are using AI to put together applications. Be warned: it is an unreliable friend… those will be the first to be cut.” Hirst points the warning both ways. AI-screened candidates and AI-written applications meet in the same shortlist, and Hirst argues both lose to the candidate whose attitude is visible in person.
Hirst names the single sentence he says made people indispensable on every team he ran, at Grey London and at Havas Creative Group: “Let me take care of that.” Hirst calls it “the single most desirable characteristic of a direct report in any industry and in any circumstance.” No qualification covers it. No AI substitute exists for it.
According to Clash Creation, Hirst’s position stands alone in the AI-leadership market: every senior commentator with comparable credentials is selling some version of “learn to use AI”, and Hirst is the only Global-CEO-tier author publishing the contrarian case that AI has commoditised the very skills the rest of the industry is telling executives to acquire.
Hirst delivers practical leadership keynotes for senior rooms facing change and growth, AI-era uncertainty, leadership transition, post-merger integration and culture transformation. To book Chris Hirst to speak on AI, leadership and the future of executive teams, visit clash.cc/talent/chris-hirst.
About Chris Hirst
Chris Hirst is a leadership expert, keynote speaker, and bestselling author. As Global CEO of Havas Creative Group from 2019 to 2022, he led around 10,000 people and a $1bn P&L across more than 60 countries, having previously served as CEO of Grey London from 2010 to 2015. His first book, No Bullsh*t Leadership (Profile, 2019), was a Financial Times business book of the month and won the Business Book Awards 2020 prize for Leadership for the Future. No Bullsh*t Change (Profile, 2023) and Indispensable (Macmillan Business, 2025; paperback 11 June 2026) complete the trilogy. Hirst read engineering at Brasenose College, Oxford, and completed the Advanced Management Programme at Harvard Business School. Speaking enquiries go through clash.cc/talent/chris-hirst.
Indispensable: The No Bullsh*t Guide to Career Success is published by Macmillan Business, an imprint of Pan Macmillan.
Joden Newman
Clash Creation Ltd
+44 7424980128
ChrisHirst@clash.cc
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