The Talent Needed to Fill the AI Skill Gap

James Laughlin, High-Performance Leadership Strategist & Executive Coach

A globally recognised expert in high-performance leadership and personal mastery, based in Christchurch, James is a seven-time world champion musician. He now channels his exceptional mental discipline into empowering elite performers, from professional athletes to Fortune 500 CEOs, through his unique frameworks and coaching methods. As the mental skills coach for Canterbury Rugby, James applies principles of resilience and clarity to sharpen the competitive edge of one of the southern hemisphere’s top teams.

James Laughlin’s keynote is the human reset button in a day full of AI talk. While everyone else is focused on models, agents and automation, he’s laser-focused on the one thing every organisation will still need in an AI-saturated world: people with courage, self-belief and the ability to connect. A seven-time world champion musician turned high-performance coach, James works with elite athletes, Fortune 500 leaders and, closer to home, as the mental skills coach for Canterbury Rugby. His session, The Power of Being a Possibilitarian, is really about the talent you need to fill the AI skill gap – not coders or prompt engineers, but humans who are willing to lead themselves first, rewrite their belief systems and lean hard into the traits machines can’t replicate.

He opens with a story that sets the tone. Called into work with a senior leadership team in Auckland that’s “going through a bit of a crisis,” he sits down with eight leaders and quietly refuses to start. They insist everyone is present. He looks around and points out what nobody has said out loud: everyone at the table looks the same – same gender, same skin colour, roughly the same age. Before they talk strategy or performance, he wants them to confront the lack of diversity and the fact that some people clearly aren’t being invited to the table at all. It’s a live demonstration of what he’s about to preach: becoming more human, not less, even when that’s uncomfortable.

He shares his own human story from a divided Northern Ireland. He grew up in a Protestant town where Catholics were dehumanised as dangerous “others” – until his mum quietly told him she was Catholic, which technically made him a “half and half.” Schoolyard fights followed, driven by identity and shame, until a headmaster, Mr Pollock, intervened. Instead of more detention, the principal gave him a set of drumsticks. James imagined himself as Ringo Starr, destined for New York or LA. Instead, the headmaster marched into assembly in a kilt, playing the bagpipes, and conscripted him into the school pipe band. Ringo gave way to pipe band snare drumming, and the first spark of high performance was lit.

James’ competitiveness took over. When Mr Pollock told him he could become an Irish champion, he immediately asked about British, New Zealand and world titles. At 13 he travelled across the Irish Sea, won his quarter and semi-finals, and was about to play the world championship final when his father pulled him aside and warned him not to get “too big for his boots.” What his dad didn’t know was that James had been secretly listening to Tony Robbins tapes for years. He’d already internalised the idea that if you walk in expecting to lose, you will. He went in believing he could win, and did.

That win, though, played out against a backdrop of real violence: friends being knee-capped by paramilitaries, late-night industrial estates, knee-high trauma as normal life. The contrast between world titles and a world falling apart is what makes his later message about belief and possibility land so hard.

A chance phone call from Christchurch changed the trajectory. A private school wanted to become the first New Zealand outfit to win a world pipe band title and invited the teenage world champion to come and coach. With the help of then-MP Lianne Dalziel, who pushed a talent visa through Immigration, he found himself 12,000 miles away teaching a Scottish instrument in Aotearoa. That team ultimately did become world champions, but he’s quick to say it wasn’t his “secret sauce.” The breakthrough came when he stopped drilling technique and started telling stories. He realised high performance has three components: skill set, mindset and, most importantly, heart set – the self-belief that you actually deserve the result you are chasing. Until the band believed they could beat the world’s best at their own game, they never would.

That loop – story to belief to action – is the core of his message for an AI age. Filling the “AI skill gap” is not just about getting people to learn tools. It’s about helping them believe they can reinvent themselves, double their prices, ask for the role they really want and walk into negotiations as equals, not as impostors. He returns to Northern Ireland with his son years later and, walking past his old primary school, literally bumps into Mr Pollock again. The headmaster laughs that he still uses James’ story to “trick kids into the pipe band.” For James, the label finally lands: Mr Pollock is a “Possibilitarian” – someone who sees problems and instinctively looks for possibilities. His argument is that in an AI world, your career will be shaped less by your job title and more by whether you’re willing to be that kind of person.

He grounds the inspiration in something practical: a high-performance planner he gives away to the audience. It’s full of daily and weekly planning models, mental frameworks he uses with athletes and execs, and simple monthly self-check-ins. The reason, he says, is that everyone will leave the Summit energised and then get “back to busy being busy” on Monday. The planner is a way to drag those insights back into the calendar and convert ideas into habits. This, again, is his bigger point about talent in the AI era: the people who are going to thrive are not the ones who hear the most keynotes, but the ones who have a system to act on them.

Then comes his favourite provocation: “You are all full of BS.” He lets that land, then flips the definition – BS is Belief Systems. To prove it, he gets the room to shout out their stereotypes about Irishmen (Guinness, leprechauns, potatoes), then walks through inherited money scripts like “money doesn’t grow on trees” or “never trust the guy in the flash car.” These beliefs, given to him by a loving mum who was wary of wealth and status, didn’t help him; they pushed money away and made abundance feel suspect. He contrasts that with the script he’s now giving his own son: money does grow on trees – in your mind. If you keep watering it with curiosity, learning and adding value, money tends to show up. Beliefs about money, worth, gender roles, success and failure all show up in negotiation, and most of us have never examined whether they’re actually true.

His model is simple: achieving begins with believing. Think of anything you’ve achieved – leaving home, finishing school, buying a house – and behind it was a moment where you decided it was possible. He urges people to become “learn-it-alls” rather than “know-it-alls,” to stay relentlessly curious, and to understand that GOATs don’t obsess over fixing every weakness. They double down on their strengths and delegate the rest. In a negotiation, or a career pivot brought on by AI, clarity is everything: be radically clear about what you want, see it in your mind’s eye, and line your habits up behind it.

On his slides, the AI context is explicit. This session is branded as “Become more human, not less – the competitive edge in an AI world.” He argues that connection trumps communication, especially when machines are getting better at the surface-level communication. At a human level, people are silently asking three questions of any leader, colleague or coach: Do you care about me? Do you value me? Will you help me to succeed and grow? In James’ view, answering those three questions with your behaviour – not just your words – is the real talent gap inside organisations right now, and it’s the edge that no model can automate.

Action points:

Audit your belief systems (your “BS”)
Write down the stories you’ve inherited about money, career, leadership, AI and your own worth. Ask which ones are actually backed by evidence and which ones are just scripts you’ve never questioned. Replace the ones that shrink you with beliefs that help you negotiate and grow.

Become a possibilitarian about AI, not a victim of it
When faced with automation or change, notice the instinct to vent or catastrophise, then force yourself to list three possibilities the shift could create – new markets, new skills, new ways of working. Train yourself and your team to default to “what could go right?” rather than “why this won’t work.”

Lead with story before metrics
In your next negotiation – whether it’s budget, headcount or a new role – open with a real story that shows who you are, what you care about and what’s at stake, rather than jumping straight to numbers. Use shared stories to build shared strength and move the conversation from head to heart.

Check whether your leadership passes the “big three” questions
Assume everyone you lead is silently asking: Do you care about me? Do you value me? Will you help me succeed and grow? Review your 1:1s, feedback, recognition and development plans through that lens and adjust until the answer to all three is clearly “yes.”

Swap “know-it-all” for “learn-it-all”
Build daily habits of curiosity: ask more questions in meetings, seek feedback on your blind spots, and spend time with people outside your usual circle. Model the idea that the most interesting person in the room is the most interested person in the room.

Double down on your strengths and design around your weaknesses
Identify the two or three things you do world-class and commit to spending more time there, delegating or automating the rest – including with AI tools. Treat yourself like an elite athlete: stay in your lane and use technology and teammates to fill the gaps.

Turn Summit inspiration into rituals
Steal James’ planner idea: create or adopt a simple weekly planning system that forces you to write down what you learned, what you’ll try, and when. Put one tiny “possibilitarian” action in your calendar each week – a bold ask, a new conversation, a price rise – and treat it as training for the AI era.