Erin McGough continues to hear the same concerns from workers that the use of AI will put their jobs at risk.
“Some people say they feel like they’re training their successors every day,” said McGough, who founded and runs the career education platform AdviceWithErin.
A recent poll found that 30% of Americans believe their jobs could be made obsolete by AI. Meanwhile, more and more college students are changing their majors because of the impact AI will have on the job market.
That anxiety is not unfounded. Businesses are investing billions of dollars in AI to increase efficiency. Companies could reduce labor costs by allowing technology to do the work that companies currently pay workers to do. Some are already talking about how they are replacing employees with AI.
Other companies, like BNY, are hiring “digital employees” to handle day-to-day operations. The bank said the aim was not to replace staff, but to free up staff for other duties.
As AI capabilities improve, it is not surprising that these workers worry that using AI now and thereby contributing to its improvement will make them less employable in the future. But McGough and other workplace observers told Business Insider that the result likely won’t be a simple one-for-one replacement.
That’s because jobs tend to require you to balance multiple tasks, deal with ambiguity, and make decisions. Therefore, it is not easy for AI to displace employees by simply monitoring their actions.
“We’re not even close to that goal in almost any area,” said JP Gounder, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.
McGough said he recently heard from people who were concerned that they had trained an AI to take their job, only to find out they ended up working as a product manager. “I said, ‘Oh, you’re in a customer-facing role. AI isn’t going to take your job right off the bat.’
Why can’t my worries go away?
More and more CEOs are deciding to cut staff because of AI. But these layoffs and hiring stagnation are often tied to pandemic-era overemployment, rising interest rates and economic uncertainty, Forrester’s Gounder said.
“This is fiction. It’s AI cleaning,” he said.
Gounder said that for many companies to justify the money they and their investors are putting into the technology, “a lot of the workforce is going to have to be replaced.” In some cases, he said, AI won’t be able to take over as many jobs. At the same time, Gounder said many of the AI systems companies use are unable to observe and learn from employee behavior.
Alex Rosenblatt, a sociologist and author of the book Uberland, said the fear for some workers stems from a deeper fear that as AI advances, it will be harder to justify their paychecks.
“The lines between what humans are doing and what machines are doing are blurry, which makes it difficult to negotiate,” she says.
What motivates employees to use AI anyway?
If companies want their teams to use AI, they first have to overcome the hurdle of convincing them that they can’t be replaced. That can be done by making it clear that the purpose of AI is to help workers succeed and be more productive, Gounder said.
“If we wanted to replace you, we wouldn’t teach you how to use these tools in parallel as part of a human-machine workflow,” he said of how many bosses think.
In some cases, employers will explicitly tell their employees that they want help with AI training. Employees may need to label data or provide feedback to the AI. When companies collect data about how their employees work, Gounder said, the goal is often to automate routine tasks rather than entire jobs.
He said it remains difficult for AI agents to fully replace workers for jobs that have fairly clear steps that could guide AI (such as coding or customer service). Of course, the overall number of jobs may still be low.
“For most people in most roles, AI will enhance rather than replace them over the next few years,” Gounder said.
At that point, job postings for software engineering roles skyrocketed in 2026, contrary to the idea that AI was taking away opportunities for developers.
The workers have been here before.
Rosenblatt said this isn’t the first time workers have worried about layoffs. She pointed out that the internet appeared several decades ago.
“Those who take these new tools and adapt them to their practices may succeed, while those who don’t may be left behind,” Rosenblatt said.
Andrei Radovanovich, a 21-year-old college student in Tampa who creates videos for a variety of clients, has embraced AI and doesn’t worry that he’s effectively tipping off future competitors. Part of the reason, he said, is that he relies on his own creativity to know what will get attention.
Radovanovic said whether they’re creating ads or corporate training videos, they still rely on traditional software tools to fill in the gaps with AI, combining automated and manual workflows.
Radovanovic said this is an important reminder: “It’s only when you actually use it that you realize how limited it really is.”
Do you have a story to share about your experience with AI at work? Contact this reporter at: tparadis@businessinsider.com.