People Are the Superpower. Not AI.

David Parkinson, CEO of Brave & Heart, makes a contrarian argument for a company that sponsors an AI-adjacent stand at London Tech Week: the market is already saturated with what he calls "a thousand identical wrappers around the same five models," and once every competitor has access to broadly the same underlying AI, the technology itself stops being the differentiator. What's left as the actual competitive advantage, in his framing, is the people deciding how to use it.

His specific target is the instinct to treat headcount as a cost to minimise once AI can do more of the work. He calls that instinct "a costly mistake," not on ethical grounds but on a practical one: the companies actually winning have teams who "argue, challenge, prototype" and iterate on ideas in ways AI genuinely can't replicate. His phrasing is blunt: AI "cannot push back, read the room or know when to scrap a brief," three very specific judgement calls that determine whether a project succeeds, none of which are outputs a language model can generate on its own.

Brave & Heart's own positioning is built around that argument rather than against it: instead of selling generic "AI strategy" consultancy, the pitch is hand-built tools that integrate AI into how a team already works, explicitly framed as removing repetitive strain so people have more room for the judgement calls that actually matter, rather than replacing the people making them.

His most concrete claim is about where real advantage in a team actually comes from: pairing experienced consultants with junior staff who ask the unconventional questions the experienced people have stopped noticing to ask. In that model, AI is what he calls "the multiplier," amplifying what a genuinely diverse, argumentative team already produces, not the source of the ideas being multiplied.

The piece is aimed squarely at leaders holding a transformation budget who are, in his words, already skeptical of generic vendor pitches promising AI will solve a strategy problem on its own. For anyone building a career on the strategy or transformation side of tech rather than the pure engineering side, it's a useful data point that the market itself, not just a training provider, increasingly treats judgement, challenge and team dynamics as the scarce skill, with the AI tooling around them treated as already commoditised.