In the 1950s, General Mills launched a product that was meant to revolutionize domestic life: the Betty Crocker cake mix. It was the height of post-war convenience culture in the United States. Families were adapting to modern life with new appliances and products designed to make everyday chores easier.
The Betty Crocker mix came ready-made, with all the ingredients dehydrated—including powdered eggs. All you had to do was open the box, add water, mix, and bake. A homemade cake in minutes, without effort, without mess, without complications.
On paper, it was the perfect product. But there was one problem: sales didn’t take off.
General Mills was puzzled. After all, the product delivered exactly what it promised: convenience and speed. Why weren’t housewives buying it?
That’s when they called in psychologist Ernest Dichter, a pioneer of consumer motivation research. Through interviews and focus groups, Dichter uncovered something surprising: the product was “too easy.” So easy, in fact, that women felt guilty—like they were cheating when baking for their families. The question nagged at them: “Can I really call this a homemade cake if I only added water?”
The solution was counterintuitive. Instead of making the process even easier, General Mills reintroduced effort: they removed the powdered egg from the mix and required consumers to crack and beat a fresh egg themselves. That small step restored a sense of participation, involvement, and care.
The result? Sales skyrocketed. And more than 70 years later, most cake mixes still require you to add a fresh egg.
The lesson is powerful: it’s not enough to deliver the final result; people need reasons to feel proud of the process. And in the age of Artificial Intelligence, this lesson has never been more relevant.
Work as Self-Expression: From Hegel to the AI Age
In 19th-century Germany, philosopher Friedrich Hegel argued that work—and mastery of a craft—is more than a means of survival. Work is a form of self-expression. Through it, we project who we are into the world, refine our skills, and achieve a kind of liberation by mastering nature.
Work provides income, yes. But it also offers self-worth, belonging, opportunities for growth, and deep meaning. When our work is threatened—because the skills that make us valuable are at risk—all these dimensions are threatened too.
Fast forward to today, and this notion of self-expression is under pressure, because more and more of our work is becoming an expression of… AI.
When AI Challenges Identity: The Case of Lee Sedol
This crisis of identity can be seen in the story of Lee Sedol, the legendary Go master from South Korea. In 2016, he lost 4–1 to AlphaGo, Google’s AI. Go, a game originating in China more than 2,500 years ago, is exponentially more complex than chess. It’s often said there are more possible board positions than atoms in the universe.
For Sedol, the loss wasn’t just personal—it marked the end of an era. In 2019, just three years later, he retired from professional play, declaring that he could no longer be the best in a world dominated by AI. Reflecting in a 2024 interview with The New York Times, he said: “Losing to AI, in a way, meant my whole world was collapsing.”
For him, Go wasn’t just a game. It was an art form, an expression of intuition, creativity, and personal style—a reflection of his very identity. Losing to the cold precision of an algorithm felt like more than losing a match.
This mirrors how many of us feel when AI outperforms us. It doesn’t just make us question our skills—it makes us question our sense of value and identity.
The Role of Pride in the Workplace
As we rush to measure what AI can do, we should give equal attention to how AI makes us feel. One emotion, in particular, is central: pride.
Behavioral scientist Dan Ariely demonstrated this in an experiment. Children and a teaching assistant were observed while parents watched from behind glass. In one group, the children had the idea for the drawing, and the assistant executed it. In the other, the assistant came up with the idea, and the children just executed. At the end, the assistant presented the drawing to the parents, claiming credit.
The result? When children only executed someone else’s idea, they didn’t fight for authorship. They felt little pride. But when the idea was theirs, they defended it fiercely: “No, I made this!”
The message is clear: pride comes from creation, not mere execution.
And this matters greatly in the era of AI. If we outsource ideation to machines, we risk losing pride, engagement, and ownership of our work. But if we remain the source of ideas while AI supports execution, we stay connected, involved—and above all, proud.
The Risk of Losing Pride at Scale
I feel this tension myself. When AI helps me with repetitive tasks—emails, slide decks, reports—I feel efficient, not guilty. But when it touches the creative core, like drafting a book chapter, sometimes I feel like I’m cheating. That feeling eats away at pride.
Now imagine this at scale: employees across industries feeling less proud of their work because AI doesn’t just execute tasks but also strips away their sense of contribution.
When pride disappears, something subtle but dangerous happens: people stop speaking up in meetings, stop defending their work, and stop going the extra mile. They disengage—not because they lack skill, but because they no longer see their personal mark in the result.
Without pride, feedback loops break, creativity shrinks, and a “good enough” culture takes over. Pride isn’t just about productivity—it’s about identity.
Customers Feel It Too: The Identity Threat of Automation
Interestingly, the same dynamic applies to customers. Just like with the Betty Crocker cake mix, people can reject automation if it threatens their sense of identity.
Researchers at the McCombs School of Business (University of Texas at Austin), together with Tulane University and Erasmus University Rotterdam, explored how people react to automated products in identity-based consumption (activities that help define who they are, like cooking, fishing, or driving).
Across six studies, they found that people who strongly identified with an activity often viewed automation as a threat to their identity—leading to lower adoption and more negative evaluations of the product.
The lesson is simple: we can delegate execution, but we must safeguard ideation and creativity. Pride in our work—and in our customers’ experiences—depends on it.
Designing AI to Preserve Human Pride
What does this mean in practice? It means designing AI systems that preserve human space for creation and identity. Some ideas include:
- AI as copilot, not pilot: systems should suggest, amplify, and execute—but leave the final decision to humans.
- Transparent authorship: make sure human contributions remain visible and recognized, even when AI assists.
- Focus AI on repetitive tasks: use technology for time-saving chores (reports, emails, processes), freeing people to think, imagine, and create.
- Co-creation tools: design interfaces where AI provokes and inspires, but ideas are born from human-AI interaction—not substitution.
- Human feedback loops: ensure human judgment is not optional but an integral part of the final output.
- Performance recognition: adapt evaluation metrics to value ideation and creativity—not just task volume.
Conclusion: The “Egg” of Creativity Must Be Ours
At the end of the day, the lesson is the same as with Betty Crocker: we can let AI mix the batter and put it in the oven, but the “egg” of creativity—that essential ingredient—must remain ours.
The future of work in the AI era will depend less on how fast machines execute tasks, and more on how much pride we continue to feel in our ideas, our creativity, and our identity.
