AI isn't taking your job. It's making your expertise worthless while you watch. The three things everyone tries that fail, and the one strategy that actually works.
This is basically, on the individual level, the optimistic scenario for the economy as a whole: New jobs are created to replace the old. But as you point out, that may not be the case.
Thanks Jan.. very insightful article. Spending a lot of time on connecting the dots between systems at work that previously were hard to connect and orchestrate.
One assumption is that you able to will do a better job than AI - obviously, it depends on the job and the person. Once you have the experience of working with an AI that does a better job of the assignment that you are able to do in any amount of time - given that your boss is paying you to produce the job - this is what is happening and will happen more and more. Has it not happened to you yet?
You're absolutely right, and that's actually the core point of the article. I'm not suggesting you can or should try to be better at the task-level work than AI. You probably can't, and at some point, AI will be faster, smarter, and more capable than we all are. My recommendation is to stop competing on task execution entirely, lets face it we cannot win that. Instead, it is better to use AI to operate at a scale that wasn't previously possible (50 campaign variations instead of 3, analyzing 1000 data points instead of 50), and build your value around orchestrating that new capability. People who know how to operate these AI agents, etc., will have a big advantage!
I found this essay on Twitter and immediately jumped here to follow you. You’re the first to clearly articulate what I’ve been seeing in a fuzzy way. Knowledge workers need to see AI as having assistants that can work for them across all digital skills. They need to manage and coordinate them to compete on an organizational level, not individual. It’s not about trying to be John Henry and digging faster to beat the steam-powered drill.
This is basically, on the individual level, the optimistic scenario for the economy as a whole: New jobs are created to replace the old. But as you point out, that may not be the case.
Thanks Jan.. very insightful article. Spending a lot of time on connecting the dots between systems at work that previously were hard to connect and orchestrate.
One assumption is that you able to will do a better job than AI - obviously, it depends on the job and the person. Once you have the experience of working with an AI that does a better job of the assignment that you are able to do in any amount of time - given that your boss is paying you to produce the job - this is what is happening and will happen more and more. Has it not happened to you yet?
You're absolutely right, and that's actually the core point of the article. I'm not suggesting you can or should try to be better at the task-level work than AI. You probably can't, and at some point, AI will be faster, smarter, and more capable than we all are. My recommendation is to stop competing on task execution entirely, lets face it we cannot win that. Instead, it is better to use AI to operate at a scale that wasn't previously possible (50 campaign variations instead of 3, analyzing 1000 data points instead of 50), and build your value around orchestrating that new capability. People who know how to operate these AI agents, etc., will have a big advantage!
I found this essay on Twitter and immediately jumped here to follow you. You’re the first to clearly articulate what I’ve been seeing in a fuzzy way. Knowledge workers need to see AI as having assistants that can work for them across all digital skills. They need to manage and coordinate them to compete on an organizational level, not individual. It’s not about trying to be John Henry and digging faster to beat the steam-powered drill.
Thanks for writing this, it clarifies a lot. This connects perfectly with your previous peice.