Before you start heating up your flamethrower, let me try to frame up the current situation. 

This is part one of a two part post. This article focuses on how and why jobs are changing and part two will focus on how you can thrive while it occurs.

Why are we so anxious?

AI has proven itself to be applicable in two ways: Augmentation and Automation. 

Augmentation is what the AI companies are promising in order to avoid the job displacement question. It’s a marketing thing. And it’s what everyone is hoping for—a powerful assistant and thought partner that can help us get our jobs done faster and with higher quality. It’s the jetpack we were all promised. 

Automation is what business operators salivate over. The promise of replacing expensive and fickle workers with machines that are smart enough to do their jobs at acceptable quality levels, thus saving loads of salary and benefits costs.

So there is a game being played. The AI companies and pundits are dangling the promise of 10x efficiency and generally staying quiet about how that will be achieved. Business operators took the bait and have been asking on repeat, where’s the ROI we were promised?

Naturally, this makes the average employee pretty nervous. Demos of AI doing our job and chatter about the end of programming and copywriting as careers doesn’t exactly fill us to the brim with optimistic visions of the future. 

What’s really going on?

Reality, as usual, is more complicated. 

Augmentation is real. If you are a power AI user, you know how much juice you can squeeze out of this technology to improve the quality and speed and even enjoyment of your work.

Automation is real. Generative AI has given us a powerful new capability that traditional programming simply can’t deliver. And we’re just getting started on figuring out how to capture its value. Pretty much every automated workflow will be examined and expanded in the next decade and new ones will be discovered. 

But…

In my experience, augmentation tends to make individuals better, not necessarily faster. My sense is that it alleviates the pressure to work fast (and create shitty work) and thus gives us the chance to enjoy our jobs more. I think everyone wants to be a craftsman in one way or another and take pride in the work they do.

Business leaders are usually disappointed after a big AI rollout because while they might see personal productivity numbers take a slight uptick, they don’t see an overall lift to the business. This lift will take time to materialize (and measure) and by the time it does, it won’t convey competitive advantage because everyone will have it. 

Leaders are overlooking the harder-to-measure benefits of augmentation and will probably start turning the screws again, demanding higher productivity and ruining this golden moment. What can I say, I’m 50 years old—I’ve seen how the cycles work. 

As for automation… at the moment, it’s hard to pull off at scale. We’ve heard all the hype about agents and operators and AGI, but the truth is, true job replacement is a faraway dream (or nightmare). The technology just isn’t there yet to provide complete job automation at an acceptable level of quality and consistency. 

‍

So we’re cool?

Um, no. 

A job is ultimately a responsibility for completing a spectrum of tasks—all those bulleted items in your job description. Some of those tasks require ingenuity, experience, charisma, thoughtful collaboration, etc. Some are just repetitive, tedious, mindless things that we haven’t figured out how to automate yet. And most are in between.

The dumb jobs are the mindless ones. If your entire job consists solely of simple tasks (and that’s very unlikely), then I’m sorry, but if you haven’t figured it out already, AI will probably replace you. 

AI is going to perform all the well-defined, straightforward, non-critical tasks, even if they currently require a human to do them, and that’s the uncomfortable bit. Nobody wants to feel like their work is being devalued, but automation has always reshaped work; AI is just quickly accelerating the process in ways we weren’t ready for.

If the dumb jobs go to AI, then what?

Like most people, I have moments of worry about people’s livelihoods in regards to AI. Goldman Sachs predicted 300M jobs lost or displaced overall. Where they get these numbers is beyond my pay grade. A more grounded prediction from the World Economic Forum predicts that 9 million jobs will be displaced this year by AI.  

…But we all get to breathe out because the same report says that 19 million jobs will be created, giving us a net growth of 10 million. 

If your job involves copying and pasting, sorting emails, or doing the same task 500 times in a row, AI is already better, cheaper, and faster than you. 

If you’re reading this article, chances are you’re not a data entry clerk or toll-booth operator. That being said, you’re probably are a knowledge worker and you’ve been seeing demos of AIs doing remarkably sophisticated tasks. 

Before you panic, let’s talk about what’s happening here and what it means for your future.

AI won’t replace you (unless you let it)

Most people think about AI all wrong. They picture a mass wave of layoffs, with super-intelligent machines that just “know” how to do their jobs stepping in to take over. The truth is far more nuanced.

AI isn’t coming for your job. It’s coming for certain tasks—the repetitive, rules-based ones that eat up time and energy. If your job is 90% those tasks, then yes, you should think about what’s next. But AI isn't a threat if you do work that requires judgment, creativity, and strategic thinking. For those tasks, it’s a tool, an enhancement. 

Imagine the bell curve of value that knowledge workers provide. At the low end you have a few employees that are low-paid and likely not considered high-value to the business (as well as the under-performers). At the high-end you’ve got a few geniuses that you have to pay through the nose for. Most of us land somewhere in the middle. 

‍

I think AI is going to shake up this curve substantially. The future curve might look something like the one below. AI will take all the rote, repetitive tasks on the low-value side of the spectrum. This will shift the nature of work for humans, focusing them on more high-value tasks. It's not so much that jobs will be eliminated—it's that jobs, and the way we work, will be different.

‍

How AI is reshaping work

1. AI makes effective people even more effective

AI is your new advantage if you’re good at what you do.

A great engineer doesn’t lose their job to AI. They use it to write, debug, and optimize code faster and with fewer mistakes. A great lawyer doesn’t fear AI. They use it to analyze case law in minutes instead of weeks.

2. AI automates the work nobody likes anyway

If a task is tedious, repetitive, and rules-based, AI will take it over.

• Manually sorting data? AI can do it instantly.
• Repetitive customer support emails? AI can handle them.
• Writing the same report every week? AI can generate it in seconds.
• Customizing cold outreach emails? Yeah, that too.

This is going to be tough for people whose jobs consist largely of these tasks. But at a higher level, it frees up human talent for more interesting, meaningful work. Nobody dreams of spending their career formatting spreadsheets (at least, no one I know). AI is clearing the way for humans to spend more of their time doing creative and strategic work.

3. AI will eventually make decisions

Right now, AI helps us do things. But in the future, it will decide things. AI-led hiring decisions will occur. We’ve already had and have had AI-driven financial investments for some time. In the supply chain world, AI increasingly plays a role in key logistics parts, like AI control towers. 

That’s where the real tension is. We’re already at a much more benign version of an Isaac Asimov novel (like I, Robot), where humans have to decide: do we trust AI to make critical decisions? And if so, what does that mean for how we define leadership, expertise, and accountability?

Next...

This is the first part of the story and it's only half of the equation.

In part two, we’ll dig into the higher ground: how to move up the value chain, build skills that AI can’t easily replace, and thrive in a world where AI is everywhere. We'll discuss three key concepts that you can act on today. 

So if you’re ready to talk about building a career (and a business) that thrives with AI, stay tuned.