Meta. Nike. Intuition. UPS. Every day, new companies announce layoffs, often citing AI as the cause. A recent report from Goldman Sachs found that AI has already reduced monthly U.S. payroll growth by about 16,000 jobs over the past year.
Knowledge workers are most at risk because they output exactly the same thing that AI replicates at superhuman speed around the clock.
“Many of the most valuable jobs – the jobs we encourage people to go to school for – software engineers, financial professionals, accountants, lawyers – many of these cognitive jobs are the ones most vulnerable to AI automation,” David Schrier, professor of AI and innovation at Imperial College London, told CNN.
But humans are always needed in some way. And there are steps you can take. This is to increase your chances of keeping your job.
Before you can guarantee your future career, you need to see with clear eyes what you are doing at work. Oded Novu, a technology management professor at New York University, told CNN that he wants people to think of work as “a collection of tasks that you switch between, often multiple times a day.”
Consider which of these tasks are the most repeatable, rule-based computer tasks, such as processing expense reports that take raw data and convert it into another format. The more predictable a function is, the more vulnerable it is to automation.
Cloudflare’s CEO wrote in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal that the company recently laid off 20% of its workforce, focusing on middle management and “measurers” in audit, operations, and compliance roles.
“AI is not coming for builders or sellers, it is coming for measurers,” he wrote. “With their tireless efforts, independence, efficiency, and availability, AI systems can now measure organizations with a level of objective detail and precision that was previously impossible even for the best employees.”
Some jobs, such as hospitality, healthcare, and skilled trades, still require someone to be physically present to do much of the work. It will take at least a decade for robotics to replace these roles.
After a self-audit, focus on skills that are less repeatable, less predictable, and less rule-based.
In addition to physical duties, Nov said AI is still not very good at handling tasks that require emotional and social awareness, such as “understanding organizational culture and group dynamics.”
AI tends to be recursive rather than original or creative.
“AI is bad at creativity, but it’s surprisingly good at elaborating on creative prompts,” Schur said. “But you still need humans to come up with ideas and guide the AI to do something interesting.”
Invest in those skills. If part of your job involves selling and signing contracts, focus on interpersonal skills that will help you build trust with clients. Customers may use AI to do their research, but they typically still want human interaction when making major purchases.
Leverage AI and learn how to make it work for you
AI will soon become as pervasive in our lives as the internet.
Get familiar with leading AI systems – ask different AI chatbots questions about your job and how they can help you do your job more efficiently, and try out their suggestions. Try out new coding tools that let you create your own apps and websites without writing your own code.
But what makes AI so useful in the workplace is not chatbots, but AI agents, or programs, that run automatically, make decisions, and take actions autonomously. You can learn how to create your own, and chatbots can help. Try the prompt: “I want to learn how to create an AI agent. This section explains the steps to create an agent that can do this. [specific task]”.
“In some ways, there’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur, because if you can think it, you can do it,” Schuur said. “There are people creating robust, enterprise-grade software built from plain English prompts.”
Even roles that include many tasks that can be performed by AI still require humans in some way.
AI is particularly impacting the coding industry. But even if Anthropic employees aren’t writing the code, they’re editing and reviewing it, CEO Dario Amodei said. at the World Economic Forum in January.
“In the best-case scenario, AI will take over the mundane tasks that are part of human jobs today, while more interesting and challenging tasks will be performed by humans, perhaps with the assistance of AI,” Novu said. “If history is any guide, it is very likely that new jobs consisting of a new set of tasks will be created.”
