Build your Human Premium to win in the age of LLMs

AI has swallowed the repeatable. What once conferred strategic advantage—fluency, speed, scale—is rapidly becoming table stakes. The premium is migrating. Today’s enterprise leaders must stake their future on cultivating what LLMs can’t mimic: imagination, judgment, trust, and embodied relationship.

This is the era of the Human Premium, and it’s not soft stuff. It’s harder, rarer, and more valuable than ever. This POV sets out what the Human Premium is, why it matters, and how enterprise leaders must systematize it, fast.

LLMs commoditize most knowledge work but can’t compete on imagination, intimacy, or integrity

Generative AI—especially in its latest multimodal, real-time incarnations—is commoditizing most of the cognitive work: translation, summarization, coding, templated design, and even synthetic conversation. Any job that requires elements of knowledge work is going to be affected. This shift will be deep and far-reaching because GPT-class capability is becoming a commodity. That is not to belittle its importance or give you an excuse to ignore the rise of AI. But ultimately, it will become table stakes.

A significant 75% of enterprise leaders surveyed in the HFS Pulse Study 2025 are already replacing human-led services or business processes with AI-led solutions or are planning to in the next three years (see Exhibit 1). The rise of what HFS defines as Services-as-Software is real and only shows signs of accelerating.

Exhibit 1: Firms are chasing LLMs’ capabilities, but the advantages will rapidly become table stakes

Sample: N=305
Source: HFS Pulse 2025

However, what LLMs can’t do is violate their own training (i.e., think outside of that black box). They can’t invent without prompt. They lack skin in the game. They mimic empathy but can’t reciprocate trust. Meaning still requires humans.

The upside? The premium for imagination, intimacy, and integrity is rising fast—and with it, the need to change enterprise priorities.

The three ‘I’s at the heart of the Human Premium

Imagination

Humans have the unique ability to conceive novel possibilities beyond current constraints or data, reframing problems and inventing future states. For example, Steve Jobs envisioned ‘the cloud’ long before the tech existed and had placed bets from that context.

Intimacy

We are all going to have to get a little more intimate. In the context of the Human Premium, intimacy is defined as the capacity to create trusted, emotionally resonant connections that are grounded in presence, reciprocity, and lived empathy. Simply put, it’s about being in the same physical space at the same time—a premium that’s emerging. In-person events and business meetings (dinners and drinks) will become increasingly relevant amid the rise of fake video, audio, and digital avatars. AI will force us out of the digital world and into the physical realm.

Integrity

Integrity is the consistent alignment of action with values, especially under pressure or when no one is watching. People trust people. People buy from people. And that comes from the belief that the person you are working with operates with integrity. At an enterprise level, consider a pharma firm that halts an AI-accelerated drug rollout when early feedback flags a social bias in trial selection. Staying consistent with doing the right thing will likely have longer-term value than rushing to hit a quarterly goal.

The HFS Human Premium framework

Establishing your Human Premium is a process that can be designed, industrialized, and measured. Here’s our framework (see Exhibit 2) to guide that journey.

Exhibit 2: The Human Premium framework identifies where LLMs are lacking and offers guidance on using human capabilities to build differentiation

Source: HFS Research, 2025

How you can industrialize the Human Premium

The Human Premium must be more than a vague HR slogan—it must be designed into KPIs, roles, incentives, and product interfaces. The first step is to audit and segregate work.

Every task in every workstream must be reclassified into two buckets. This is an opportunity to identify those workstreams that can be entirely automated and redesigned to enable that if necessary. Many workflows will likely retain elements where the Human Premium must be applied. Those elements are where you can and must differentiate.

Consider how client-facing, R&D, ops, and finance processes can be sorted into:

• Commodity Core: Automate, integrate, and eliminate
• Human Premium: Amplify, protect, and invest

For those charged with delivering the Human Premium, shift KPIs from volume to value. Reward for originality, emotional resonance, and relationship depth.

From this new platform, consider moves to amplify the Human Premium:

1. Imagination: Fund imagination as an asset class

Creativity is a process, not magic. Budget it like you would for R&D:

• Reserve 5–10% of payroll for ‘imagination residencies’—bring in sci-fi writers, artists, musicians, and comedians.
• Set up an Abduction Lab, where ‘what if’ prototypes are incentivized (and where bad ideas are killed quickly).

2. Intimacy: Re-humanise the customer interface

Don’t just replace humans with bots. Reinvest saved costs into experiences and roles that build trust:

• Convert call center efficiency into surprise-and-delight events—think in-store theatre and strategy retreats.
• Invest to enable more travel and face-to-face engagement. Embark on C-suite listening tours. Big deals are won in person.
• Scope out the role of a Chief Narrative Officer with a mandate for deep and authentic customer understanding.
• Replace dull decks with emotion-led cinematic storyboards.

3. Integrity: Generate and measure trust capital

Think of this less of a compliance cost and more of an investment in differentiation to pull customers and partners to you:

• Establish rotating ‘Moral Majority’ councils that include employees, customers, and regulators—with veto rights.
• Consider new measures—for example, tracking Ethical Return on Investment (ERoI; product kills due to ethical veto, net reputational lift, societal value).

Don’t just ask for net promoter scores (NPS). Measure actual trust-building moments. For example:

• Authentic minutes per revenue $ (face-to-face or verified digital).
• Churn delta from trust interventions (run pilots to test improvement).
• Use blockchain or biometrics to verify the authenticity of brand communications. Move now to get ahead of likely legislation.

The Bottom Line: Play the new game or become its data.

AI is making everything that’s legible (summarized and scripted), scaled, and cheap. What will remain scarce is what only humans can create: meaning, emotional trust, moral clarity, and imaginative possibility, captured in our three I’s.

Enterprise leaders must act now to:

• Segment and monetize the Human Premium.
• Treat imagination as a systematic capability.
• Anchor trust in embodied, verifiable experiences.

Those that define the game—via stories, ethics, and design—capture the upside. Those that optimize the old game risk becoming training data for their competitors’ LLMs.

Also, see our report on how to differentiate with Services-as-Software.