Nobody Knows What's Coming (And That's Fine)

By Kirsty Dove

I've been listening to a lot of interviews lately. The kind where someone very smart sits across from someone very smart and they talk for two hours about where everything's headed. AI, work, business, humanity, all of it. I put one on while I'm doing dishes or driving to a client, and lately I've noticed the same thing keeps happening: I finish the episode more unsettled than when I started.

Not because the guest was wrong. Because nobody actually knows.

That's the bit that gets left out of the thumbnail. Every one of these people, brilliant as they are, is guessing. Educated guessing, sure. Guessing with more data than I'll ever have. But guessing all the same. And I think we've built a culture around pretending otherwise, where confidence gets mistaken for accuracy, and the person who says "I don't know" the least gets booked for the most podcasts.

I run a small business. I've run it for over 15 years. In that time I've watched "best practice" flip more times than I can count. Build for Google. No, build for people. No, build for AI. Post every day. No, post less but better. Websites are dead. Websites are essential. Every year there's a new gospel, delivered with the same certainty as the last one, and every year half of it quietly gets walked back.

So here's my honest take, for what it's worth from someone in the trenches rather than on a stage: I don't think the point is to predict what's coming. I don't think anyone can, and I'm suspicious of the ones who say they can with total confidence. I think the point is to build something that can bend without snapping, no matter what the next five years throw at it.

For me that's come down to two things. Being genuinely useful, and being honestly myself.

Useful, not clever. It's tempting, in an industry that changes this fast, to chase the shiny thing purely because it's shiny. New platform, new tool, new acronym. But most of the businesses I work with don't need shiny. They need their phone to ring, their site to load, their message to make sense to a human being who's tired and scrolling and has thirty seconds to decide if they trust you. That hasn't changed in ten years and I doubt it'll change in the next ten either, whatever's driving the back end.

Honestly myself, not a performance of myself. This is the one I think gets lost most in the "future of work" conversation. Everyone's talking about how to stand out, how to build a personal brand, how to be more strategic about your online presence. And underneath all of it, I think the actual answer is smaller and less sexy: be genuine, and be kind, and let that be enough more often than you think it will be.

I say that as someone who's watched AI tools get frighteningly good at sounding like a person. I use them myself, daily, for exactly that reason — they're brilliant. But there's a difference between AI helping me say what I mean, and AI deciding what I mean for me. The first is a tool. The second is a business quietly hollowing itself out while telling itself it's being efficient. Clients can feel that difference even when they can't articulate it. So can I, honestly, when I'm on the other end of it as a customer.

None of this is a strategy document. I don't have a five-point plan for "navigating uncertainty" — if I did, I'd be suspicious of myself. What I've got instead is a rough sense that the businesses who'll come through whatever's next in good shape are the ones who were decent to deal with the whole way through. Who answered the phone. Who told the truth about timelines. Who treated a customer like a person having a problem, not a lead in a funnel.

I don't know what the business world looks like in five years. Neither does the person on the podcast, however good the haircut. But I'd put money on kindness and genuine usefulness still mattering, because they always have, through every version of "the future" we've already lived through.

That's about as close to a prediction as I'm willing to make.