For decades, impact investing has expanded our understanding of value. We learned that capital can generate financial returns while improving lives, strengthening communities, and protecting the planet. We invested in education, healthcare, financial inclusion and climate resilience because we recognized that human potential is both an economic and social asset.
Artificial intelligence now challenges us to rethink that assumption once again.
Over the last months, together with colleagues from Contexis and Planetir, we embarked on a research initiative to understand what enables young people to remain economically relevant in an age where artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping education, work, and entrepreneurship.
What we discovered, working with students from leading institutions, including Oxford Saïd Business School, Sciences Po, the Geneva Graduate Institute, IE University, the University of Amsterdam, and TU Berlin, challenged many of our assumptions. The students were not primarily asking for more technical skills. They were asking much deeper questions: Who am I? What unique value can I create? How do I remain relevant when intelligence itself has become abundant? These questions may ultimately have greater implications for investors than the latest advances in AI itself.
For decades, human capital has rightly been considered one of impact investing’s most important assets. Education, skills development, workforce participation, and lifelong learning have generated measurable economic and social returns. Yet AI is fundamentally changing the relationship between knowledge and economic value.
When information becomes universally accessible and many forms of cognitive work become increasingly automated, competitive advantage shifts. The scarce resource is no longer access to knowledge. It is rather the uniquely human capacity to create meaning, exercise judgment, adapt continuously, and translate identity into contribution. This is what AI cannot replace.
Yet there is another risk that receives far less attention. Without a clear sense of identity, purpose, and direction, AI can gradually become a crutch rather than a catalyst. Instead of amplifying human judgment, it begins to substitute for it, encouraging people to outsource decisions, creativity, and even self-understanding to increasingly capable machines.
Navigating uncertainty
Human agency fundamentally changes this relationship. Individuals who possess a strong sense of identity use AI as a productivity multiplier rather than a replacement for independent thinking. They remain the authors of their own decisions while AI becomes an increasingly powerful tool for learning, execution, creativity, and scale. If AI is becoming the defining technological infrastructure of our time, human agency is the complementary human infrastructure that ensures technology augments human potential rather than diminishing it.
In our research, we describe this capability as ‘vocational agency’: the capacity to align identity, purpose, and action to create meaningful professional contribution and sustainable economic and societal value. Human capital remains essential, but vocational agency increasingly determines whether that capital can be converted into opportunity.
To explore whether these capabilities could be intentionally strengthened, we designed a 21-day intervention combining structured reflection, behavioural experimentation, and AI-supported coaching. Participants reported measurable improvements in psychological safety, identity clarity, values alignment, perceived resources, commitment, and meaning. Perhaps even more importantly, they became more comfortable navigating uncertainty and more confident in shaping their own professional future rather than waiting for opportunities to emerge.
While this represents an early-stage study and further longitudinal research is required, the findings suggest something profound: ‘Human agency’ is not merely an abstract philosophical concept. It can be intentionally developed. That insight has significant implications for education, workforce development, and ultimately for impact investing.
One qualitative finding stood out across interviews. Young people were not simply seeking career advice. They were seeking orientation. They wanted help understanding who they are, identifying where they create distinctive value, and navigating a world in which traditional career paths are rapidly disappearing. This is a fundamentally different challenge from reskilling. It is one of positioning.
For more than two decades, impact investors have successfully financed human capital through education, vocational training, and financial inclusion. Those investments remain indispensable. But artificial intelligence invites us to ask a new question: What if the next bottleneck is no longer access to knowledge, but the ability to continuously translate knowledge into economic relevance?
If that is true, human agency itself becomes an investable outcome. This represents more than a semantic shift. Human agency determines whether individuals can continually reposition themselves as technologies evolve, occupations disappear, and entirely new forms of work emerge. It underpins entrepreneurial behaviour, resilience, creativity, collaboration, and, increasingly, economic adaptability.
Every major economic transformation has required new forms of infrastructure. The Industrial Revolution required railways and electricity. The digital economy required broadband, cloud computing, and smartphones. The AI economy will undoubtedly require computational infrastructure. Our research suggests, however, that it also requires something less visible and equally essential: systems that help people continually discover where they create unique value, experiment safely, learn rapidly, and convert purpose into meaningful economic participation.
We have come to think of this emerging category as human agency infrastructure.
Like educational institutions, such systems do not replace human capital. They amplify it. They create the conditions under which people can repeatedly transform identity into contribution throughout lives that will almost certainly involve multiple careers, professions, and reinventions. They ensure that AI remains an instrument of human empowerment rather than human dependency.
Uniquely human
For impact investors, this presents a compelling frontier. Imagine measuring not only employment outcomes but also identity, clarity, adaptability, entrepreneurial experimentation, resilience, and long-term economic participation. Imagine financing platforms, educational models, workforce transition programs, and community ecosystems that intentionally strengthen these capacities.
The measurable outcome would no longer be simply whether someone found a job. It would be whether they developed the capacity to continuously create value despite constant technological change. In the emerging AI economy, we are witnessing something unprecedented: a person’s identity is becoming one of their most important economic assets. Those who understand who they are and where they create distinctive value will increasingly use AI to amplify that contribution. Those who do not risk allowing AI to define it for them.
Artificial intelligence is often described as replacing human work. A more useful perspective may be that it is changing what uniquely human work actually is. If intelligence becomes abundant, then agency becomes scarce. Every generation is asked to rethink what creates value. The Industrial Revolution asked us to invest in factories. The knowledge economy asked us to invest in human capital. Artificial intelligence is now ushering us into the creator economy, where economic value increasingly depends on the ability to combine identity, purpose, creativity and technology in ways that are uniquely human.
It asks whether our greatest investment opportunity now lies in strengthening the capabilities that allow people not simply to work alongside intelligent machines, but to direct them with intention, imagination, and purpose.
Impact investing has always anticipated tomorrow’s infrastructure before it became obvious.
Today, that infrastructure may no longer be physical. It may be profoundly human.
Florian Kemmerich is founder and chief vocating officer at vocating.ai.
Randall Zindler is a senior lecturer on leadership, governance and strategy at Lancaster University.
