AI Is Coming for Your Job — Or Is It? 5 Ways to Make Yourself Harder to Replace
The real financial question may not be how many workers artificial intelligence replaces, but how many new jobs, businesses and opportunities it creates.
Apparently, artificial intelligence is going to take our jobs.
All of them.
We'll be sitting home in our pajamas while bots do our work, answer our emails, manage our money and, presumably, complain to each other about the boss at the virtual watercooler.
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I'm not buying it.
We've seen this movie before
Every technological revolution arrives carrying the same warning: This time, the machines are coming for us.
The loom was going to replace the weaver. The automobile was going to destroy jobs tied to the horse. ATMs were supposed to eliminate bank tellers. The internet was going to make entire industries — and plenty of workers — obsolete.
Now it is AI's turn.
The headlines are certainly frightening enough. AI can write reports, analyze financial statements, create advertising, answer customer questions, write computer code and increasingly perform tasks that once required highly trained professionals.
So, should we start cleaning out our desks?
Not so fast
With every new technology, some jobs have disappeared. Others have changed. And entirely new industries — and millions of jobs — have been created that nobody could have imagined.
So maybe we're asking the wrong question.
Here's an even more provocative question: What if AI doesn't make people less valuable? What if it makes the right people much more valuable?
That is where this gets interesting.
AI can analyze a mountain of data before I finish my coffee. It can draft a memo, summarize a meeting, write computer code and probably compose a perfectly respectable thank-you note.
But can it know when the numbers are technically right and the decision is dead wrong? Can it read a room? Can it recognize that a frightened employee doesn't need another spreadsheet — they need someone to tell them what happens next? Can it take responsibility?
Can it have an original idea that comes from 40 years of experience, mistakes, relationships, intuition and occasionally falling flat on its face?
Not yet. And maybe that's the point.
The future may not belong to AI
The future may belong to people who figure out how to use AI.
My good friend and AI expert Priyanka Rao co-authored a Newsweek article (paywall), "The Empty Office: What Happens When AI Runs the Company." I asked her the obvious question: "If AI can do entry-level work, where do future experts come from?"
Rao answered candidly. "This is the one I actually worry about. The risk isn't the people who get things wrong. It's the people who get things wrong and are certain they're right, because they've stopped doing the thinking that would tell them otherwise.
"That's what happens when someone learns a skill by reviewing AI's output instead of producing their own first draft under pressure and getting it corrected. Juniors used to learn by doing something badly and having someone senior take it apart.
"If AI does the first draft, that correction loop disappears quietly, and nobody notices for a few years, until someone gets promoted into a senior seat having never actually done the work unsupervised."
What could AI do?
- AI could produce a similar transformation across white-collar America
- An accountant may spend less time assembling numbers and more time interpreting them
- A financial adviser may spend less time generating reports and more time understanding a family's goals
- A doctor may spend less time documenting a visit and more time talking with a patient
- A lawyer may spend less time searching thousands of documents and more time developing strategy
- A small-business owner may suddenly have access to analytical and administrative capabilities that previously required an entire staff
Productivity can create jobs, too
We tend to think about AI productivity backward.
If 10 employees can accomplish the work of 20, we immediately see 10 jobs disappearing. But what if those 10 people can now serve twice as many customers? What if a company that previously couldn't afford a marketing department can suddenly market nationally?
What if an entrepreneur can use AI to handle accounting, research, scheduling and customer service — and therefore finally afford to hire salespeople, designers, technicians or other specialists?
Technology doesn't simply reduce the number of people required to produce something. By lowering the cost of producing it, technology can increase demand. That can create entirely new businesses — and entirely new categories of jobs.
Few parents in 1990 were encouraging their children to become app developers, social-media managers, cybersecurity specialists or cloud architects. Those jobs didn't exist.
We should assume the AI economy will invent occupations we can't yet name.
That doesn't mean we should ignore the casualties. Not everyone is going to win. Technological transitions can be brutal for the people caught on the wrong side of them.
Early-career workers may be particularly vulnerable because many of the traditional entry-level assignments — research, basic analysis, drafting and administrative work — are exactly the tasks AI can perform well.
Don't compete with AI — learn to manage it
What do you advise your young colleagues to do? I think the financial lesson is surprisingly simple. Advise them not to build their career around doing something AI can do faster and cheaper. Build it around what AI allows them to do better.
Learn how to question it. Direct it. Check it. Correct it. Combine its capabilities with expertise it doesn't possess. And cultivate the stubbornly human skills that become more valuable as machines become more capable: Judgment, empathy, creativity, leadership, negotiation, ethics, curiosity and trust.
The person who knows how to use AI may replace the person who doesn't. But I suspect there is another possibility that receives far less attention. AI may allow one human being to accomplish things that previously required 10.
And when millions of people suddenly become capable of doing more, building more and creating more, history suggests they don't simply go home.
They invent something else. The office of the future may indeed contain fewer people doing yesterday's work. But that doesn't necessarily mean there will be fewer people working. It may simply mean we'll need them somewhere else.
Five ways to make yourself and your kids harder to replace
1. Stop hiding from AI.
If your reaction to AI is, "I don't understand it, and I don't want to," you may have just volunteered to become obsolete. You don't have to become a computer scientist. You do have to learn how AI can make you better at the job you already have.
Start using it. Ask it questions. Let it summarize something. Have it analyze information, critique your work or give you 10 suggestions for solving a problem. Then — and this is important — use your brain to decide whether it's right.
2. Figure out which parts of your job a machine can do.
Make a list of what you do all day. If half of it consists of moving information from one place to another, producing routine reports, scheduling, summarizing or creating first drafts, assume AI is eventually going to do some of that.
Don't defend those tasks. Give them away. Then ask the much more important question: What can I do with the time I just got back?
That's where your future job may be hiding.
3. Double down on being human.
AI has information. You have judgment.
You can negotiate with a difficult client, recognize that your boss is about to make a terrible decision, calm an angry customer, motivate a team, sell an idea and take responsibility when something goes wrong.
Those aren't "soft skills." In an AI economy, they may become some of our hardest assets to replace.
4. Become the person who knows how to use AI — not the person waiting to be taught.
Don't wait for Human Resources to send you to AI Training 101. Experiment. Take a course outside of work. Ask your employer what AI tools the company is adopting and volunteer to test them.
And put those skills on your résumé. Don't just say, "Experienced in AI." Say what you actually accomplished: Used AI to reduce research time by 30%. Automated weekly reporting. Cut proposal preparation from three hours to one.
The World Economic Forum estimates that nearly 40% of the skills required on the job will change by 2030. That sounds frightening until you realize something important: Skills can be learned.
5. Don't make your job your financial life raft.
This is the part nobody wants to talk about.
Even if AI ultimately creates more jobs than it eliminates, that doesn't mean your job can't disappear.
- Build an emergency fund
- Pay down expensive debt
- Keep your résumé and network alive
- Don't automatically increase your lifestyle every time your salary increases
- Keep investing for retirement
Career resilience and financial resilience are becoming the same conversation. You don't need to predict exactly what AI will do to the workforce. You need to make sure you're financially prepared if it does something to yours.
Don't compete with the machine
The winners of the AI revolution probably won't be the people who know everything about artificial intelligence.
They'll be the people who know something AI doesn't: Their customers, their businesses, their colleagues, their industries — and themselves.
AI may be able to do 30% of your job.
Great.
Give it the 30%.
Then become indispensable at the other 70%.
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