Aneesh Raman has had a career that feels like it was invented in a scriptwriting room. He covered wars for CNN, wrote speeches for President Barack Obama, worked at a startup, and now serves as LinkedIn’s Chief Economic Opportunity Officer. There, we believe a dataset drawn from over 1.2 billion members provides the clearest real-time view of how artificial intelligence is being rewired.
Co-authored with LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky, Raman Open to Work: How to move forward in the age of AIthis book is built on one stubbornly hopeful premise. The people who will succeed in the AI era will be the ones who stop imitating machines and start rediscovering what makes them human.
When we spoke recently, Raman started the conversation with Apollo 13 and Flight Director Gene Kranz’s famous line, “Failure is not an option.” It’s not a throwaway metaphor. “We are experiencing the greatest job disruption in human history,” he told me. “Everything is being rewired all at once.” What saved these astronauts, he argued, was that they “refused to focus on impossible odds” and instead chose to “focus on the steps at hand and take each step with the belief that failure is not an option.” To him, that’s the frame all leaders need right now.
LinkedIn data tells a bigger story. 24% of average job skills changed between 2015 and 2022. It is predicted to rise to 70% by 2030. “That means your job is changing on your own, even if you’re not changing jobs,” Raman said. He likens the AI moment to the arrival of electricity, rather than the steam engine being replaced by electricity. Early adopters who replaced electric motors with steam engines saw no benefit. Leaders who redesigned their entire workflows around the new energy “saw productivity soar to levels never seen before.” His advice is straightforward. “Leaders need to be as much people-oriented as they are AI-oriented,” and “Be insatiably curious now.”
That curiosity extends directly to biology. Raman argues that fear of change is not a weakness, but a strained wiring. “As humans, we have a natural fear of change,” he says. “We’re not designed to make exponential change.” That’s why he urges leaders to “start with extreme empathy,” and “start from there, acknowledge it, and tell stories that inspire agency and even aspiration.”
The hardest thing he asks leaders to let go of is the organizational chart itself. “The hardest thing for executives to do is let go of the idea that all teams are led by people who simply manage the team’s tasks and execution against predetermined goals and predetermined OKRs.” [Objectives & Key Results] and KPI [Key Performance Indicators]”Ladders and pyramids are tools created in the industrial age to aim for stability. Their runway has run out in a labor market that predicts that the future will be “stabilized into an ever-adaptive labor market and business environment.”
Instead, Raman and Roslansky offer what they call the “5 Cs”: curiosity, courage, creativity, compassion, and communication. “We didn’t want to write an AI how-to book,” he told me. “We wanted to write a ‘how-to’ book for humans with AI.'” “The 5 C’s are skills. Like any skill, you need to practice them deliberately over time to acquire them,” Raman asserted.
Curiosity, he argues, begins with subtraction of leadership. “Start by stopping punishing the wrong answers.” He borrows Ted Lasso’s quote, “Be curious, not critical,” and makes it a first principle for executives looking for the next great idea. Courage can also be developed through repeated practice. “The more you do that, the more comfortable you feel with being uncomfortable,” he said. “And for me, that’s fuel for courage.”
Raman pushes back on concerns that AI will flatten creativity. “AI is a tool that enables versatility for everyone,” he said. “That doesn’t mean it’s suddenly a new ceiling and none of us can reach that ceiling. It means we’ve all been that ceiling to begin with.” Long dismissed as a luxury, compassion has become a business necessity. “The higher you go, the more important it becomes that people want to work with you,” and it’s precisely because “authenticity is becoming more important by the day,” that communication becomes the most in-demand skill on LinkedIn in 2024.
Raman’s favorite overhaul might be turning the career ladder into a climbing wall. “The most freeing part and the scariest part is knowing that your career depends on you,” he said. The ladder brought transparency, but that transparency was a cage. “No generation of humans has had more agency than this generation, and they will be working for years to come.” No more 10-year plans. All you need is conviction about what’s important right now and a willingness to move sideways, or down, and up. Raman did just that. He quit a high-profile reporting job at CNN, took an unpaid internship with the Obama campaign, and once bribed his way into the weekend office at Dunkin Donuts.
The same shift hits HR the hardest. “The new resume is a work product,” Raman said. What leaders need to examine now is “AI fluency and entrepreneurial spirit.” The important question is no longer where someone went to school. It’s “Show me what you’ve done.”
If there’s anything that can soothe anxiety, it’s history. “Work is changing, not dying,” Raman said, citing an MIT study that found “60% of jobs in 2018 did not exist in 1940.” Being a data scientist wasn’t a profession 20 years ago. Being a creator wasn’t a profession 10 years ago. He said the recent surge on LinkedIn is an increase in members who identify themselves as founders or creators.
What should leaders do tomorrow? Raman’s answer: Stubbornly simple. “The most important thing is to do one thing differently. Experiment with tools. Practice one of the five C’s in your meetings. Move a task from ‘I’ll do this’ to ‘AI will help you do this. This is the easiest technology humans have ever created,’ he said. ‘You can literally just talk to it.’
And there are lines that are repeated over and over again even after the conversation is over. “Once you define who you are, no one can beat you.”
It turns out that the AI era is not a race between humans and machines. It is a long-awaited invitation for humans to remember, concretely and unapologetically, what they are all about.
