In March 2016, one of the greatest Go masters alive stared at a board and couldn't understand what he was seeing. The machine across from him had just placed a stone in a position so wrong that the commentators (elite players themselves) called it an error at first. Lee Sedol stood up and left the room. When the game ended, the "error" turned out to be the most creative move in the history of the game.
Move 37
Go had long been considered too intuitive, too creative for a machine to master. Experts said we were decades away from AI beating a top player. Then Google's AlphaGo team, led by Demis Hassabis, played its 37th move in Game 2 against Lee Sedol. It was unlike any strategy a human had ever conceived. It wasn’t learned; it was invented.
When Lee Sedol returned to the board, he said: "I thought AlphaGo was based on probability calculation and that it was merely a machine. But when I saw this move, I changed my mind. Surely, AlphaGo is creative."
(Watch the award-winning documentary on YouTube.)
Your Move 37 Is Coming
Paul Roetzer, founder of SmarterX, built an entire keynote around this moment at MAICON 2025. His argument: everyone will have their own Move 37 moment sooner or later. That instant when you realize AI isn't just faster than you; it's better than you at something you thought was yours. Something you defined yourself by.
He's right, and for many of us, those moments are already happening.
A 2026 study from Université de Montréal tested AI against 100,000 humans on creativity, the largest study of its kind ever conducted. The result was that AI now outperforms the average human on structured creative tasks. Not on speed but on originality. The top 10% of humans still lead, but the floor has shifted underneath everyone else.
Paul Schrader, the screenwriter behind Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, admitted that when he fed ChatGPT one of his old scripts, it returned notes as good or better than anything he'd ever received from a human collaborator. His words: "I've just come to realize AI is smarter than I am."
If it can happen to a generational screenwriter, it can happen to you. If it hasn't already, it's likely a matter of time.
How I Think About It Now
My own work has transformed many times in the last three years. What I did in 2023 looks almost nothing like what I do today.
I was a little sad at first. I used to love programming, but then little by little I realized I could apply my programming skills and analytical thinking in how I strategize and solve business problems.
All of a sudden, I went from sad and fearful to excited and almost feeling invincible. If AI handles what I do now, great, do it, what am I onto next? I feel like the possibilities of where I bring value now are never-ending, because I think about opportunities differently. I delegate more, but I also invent more. I made this into a habit of establishing checkpoints to evaluate what I do against what AI can do. Funny thing is, I can even chat with AI about how I can reinvent myself, and it will give me phenomenal ideas to consider.
It's Not Just Personal
I decided to start asking the same questions in the company where I lead AI. It's built into our AOP now. Can AI do this service we provide? If the answer is yes (and increasingly it is), that service comes off the list or gets built into our Agentic AI systems. Not because it wasn't good work. Because charging for something a machine does better and faster isn't a business model. It's a countdown.
So we keep asking: where is our value for our clients now?
Surprisingly, this hasn't been difficult at all, and the reason is that we prepared for it. Everyone at the agency has gone through core AI training, is licensed, and takes part in weekly agency-wide AI trainings, and has done so for over a year now. When you invest that heavily in AI literacy across an entire organization, reinvention doesn't feel like a crisis. It feels like an opportunity. The team sees the shifts coming because they're inside the tools every day, not reading about them secondhand.
Many companies will struggle with this because they don’t yet have that foundational step. You can't pivot a team that doesn't understand what it's pivoting toward.
The Real Skill of Next Year
I believe the number one goal of the coming year, for individuals, for teams, for entire businesses, is to embrace continuous reinvention. Not as a buzzword, but as a practice. A rhythm. A mindset that says: the version of me that was valuable six months ago may not be the version that's valuable six months from now.
Move 37 didn't end Go. It transformed it. After AlphaGo, human players studied its strategies and started playing more creatively than ever before. The game got richer because the ceiling got higher.
That's the opportunity in front of all of us. But only if we stop clinging to the version of our expertise that made us valuable before and start building the one that makes us valuable next.
Have you had your Move 37 moment yet? Or are you still staring at the board, wondering if it’s an error?
— Yas Dalkilic
Head of AI, RAB2B
