There are moments that every professional dreads. It’s the moment when you realize that the jobs you once defined can now be done faster and cheaper by machines. For V Shrinath, founder of Bengaluru-based Salient Advisory and mentor at Google Startups, that moment came last year. He has spent years straddling consulting and technology. He knew how these worlds operated, how companies sold their expertise, how talent pipelines were built, and how the illusion of craft was carefully maintained.
but He also observed the evolution of AI up close. He kept coming back to one question. The question was when would AI (artificial intelligence) replicate the parts of the job that he considered expertise? He broke down and explained his work line by line. This is something audit consultants recommend to their clients but rarely do themselves. The analysis was frightening, but thought-provoking.
He noticed that much of his consulting followed a pattern. AI will be able to accurately address topics such as “How do I create specifications for development and go-to-market?” The process remains the same. AI knows them. it runs them. It standardizes them. Tech jobs couldn’t be more secure. AI can read patterns better than humans, spot anomalies faster, and even suggest fixes. Creative code? At least for now, it was still man’s turf. But everything around it, all the scaffolding, all the logic, all the boring parts? It slipped out of people’s hands.
Srinath realized what most white-collar professionals are still unwilling to accept: AI will not disrupt their jobs. I was going to expose it.
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He chose a direction that others might read as a leap forward. To him, it was a logical move. Consulting and technology seemed stable on the surface, but the foundations were changing rapidly. Staying there felt more unsettling than leaving. “I didn’t go from stability to risk,” he said. “I moved away from a future that no longer made sense.” He turned to the kind of work that remained firmly human, reading situations with incomplete information, starting conversations that data didn’t start, and piecing together insights that weren’t recorded anywhere.
His story is no different. This is a preview. Because everywhere you look, the surface is cracked. There’s something unpleasant underlying it. Many modern white-collar jobs don’t require the expertise we think they need.
The Big Four professional services firms have announced layoffs. Inside these firms, senior partners have acknowledged things they haven’t acknowledged in press releases. Today, nearly 60% of analyst-level jobs are performed or heavily assisted by generative AI. Analysts who once spent their nights writing reports, synthesizing data, and producing documentation are finding that these machines can do the same things in minutes. Managers quietly complain that new employees can’t write, can’t structure, can’t think. That’s because the tools do it for you. But the deeper danger is that Toole is outperforming his juniors at his work. The first ten rungs of the career ladder are gone.
The cracks in journalism are accelerating. Newsrooms around the world are now running AI systems that deliver business summaries, sports updates, earnings summaries, weather forecasts, and more at near zero cost. The use of synthetic articles by news organizations has increased significantly over the years. In India, Rewrite Desk is testing automated bots.
Reporters who have spent their careers fixing press releases are now faced with a void. It turned out that the “technology” they believed in could be reproduced on a large scale by machines. What’s left is one thing AI can’t do: report. And many professionals have never learned how to do it after years of sedentary desk jobs.
Marketing, finance, legal, education, all facing the same story with different accents. AI Studio is currently automating ad variations and campaign concepts. Automated valuation models outperform junior analysts. AI creates contracts in minutes. AI tutors personalize lessons better than most human teachers.
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For decades, white-collar jobs were based on the comfortable assumption that intelligence, judgment, and experience make you irreplaceable. But when AI can read scans more accurately than a radiologist, write contracts faster than a junior lawyer, produce sharper reports than an analyst, create more thorough lesson plans than a tutor, and coach salespeople more consistently than a manager, what will be left of the old professional hierarchy?
The data reflects the cruel sorting ahead. The World Economic Forum predicts that “high-interaction” roles such as negotiation, conflict resolution, and relationship management will increase by 21-25% over the next five years. Roles that rely on predictable cognitive tasks are predicted to shrink by more than 40%.
The future belongs to those who step out from behind the information into the world. Someone who makes real discoveries, not reformats. A person who builds a moat based on originality rather than output.
Srinath understood this. He doesn’t have a promising career. He has established a promising identity. Because it’s not jobs that are collapsing right now. It’s the story experts tell themselves about why they matter.
And that’s the part that should make every reader gasp a little. AI is not going to take away jobs. That’s taking away excuses. The person who endures is not the person who learns how to use a machine. They learn to do what machines cannot: see clearly, judge wisely, and create meaning not yet on the page.
(Charles Assisi is a co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached at assisi@foundingfuel.com)
