Will your job be replaced by AI?

AI with ALLIE

The professional’s guide to quick AI bites for your personal life, work life, and beyond.

May 17, 2024

This month's newsletter tackles the pressing issue of AI and its implications for our jobs. We'll start to explore how AI may impact job titles, numbers, and growth—and how to think about your next career step. This is just the beginning, and I’ll continue to cover this topic in future newsletters and courses.

After we've covered that, I have a whole slew of AI tools, courses, and blogs to catch you up on. Get ready to unpack the big questions, pick up some neat AI integration tips, and enroll in my next AI course.

Let’s jump in.

*Quick aside, this edition of the newsletter is going to feel uncomfortable to read. It was at times uncomfortable to write, especially knowing it wasn’t going through 12 levels of review. I’m going to ask you to push past that discomfort and read it anyways.

Jump ahead:

• Is AI actually going to take your job someday?

  • Why do people say AI won't take any jobs?

  • So, how do you start to prepare for an AI-driven w …

  • And what about a long-term AI strategy?

  • Final thoughts

• LAST CALL: Ready to lead in the AI age?

• Tools, courses, and blogs that caught my eye:

Is AI actually going to take your job someday?

I’m just going to point out the elephant in the room. Tied with “is AI going to kill us all?”, this is probably the top theme question I get.

Allie, will I still have a job in 2 years? Will it be the same job? What can I do now to keep my job safe? Should I be worried?

You’re not alone.

And it’s normal to have these questions.

It’s in every news outlet, it's a narrative you’re hearing at work, and it's a hot topic in every boardroom.

And there’s probably a common retort you’re hearing on the topic too. If you’ve been on social media the last two years, you’ve seen posts that say something like “AI won’t take your job. Someone who knows how to use AI will.” In fact, here’s a quote in CNBC saying it it just this week.

And while I think that's correct in the near-term...that's just it, it's near-term. People are afraid to talk about the bigger picture. It's time we zoom out because not having this honest conversation is hurting us.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, actually had the same complaint I have earlier this month. Sitting down with Sally Kornbluth, the President of MIT, Sam said:

So, if Sam is saying this, and closed-door rooms are saying this, why is this alternative narrative happening?

Why do people say AI won't take any jobs?

There are two prisms I use to understand the world and decisions people make: incentives and tradeoffs, aka why are people motivated to do the thing, what were their other options, and what implicit preferences drove them to pick the one they picked.

If you know someone’s goals and values, you can start to get an early picture of what decisions they might make.

So as I look at the many reasons that people claim AI won’t take any jobs, the reasons or motivations vary, but here are a few themes I’ve picked up on:

1. Sheer optimism. They think automation will magically create new opportunities without replacing anything significant.

2. Strict legal. They work for a client, company, or organization that has a very specific talk track and/or won't let them say otherwise.

3. Honest survival. They're in self-preservation mode and want to protect their jobs.

4. Hopefulness. They're hoping for a silver lining—they hope that as AI handles the routine stuff, we'll evolve into more creative, strategic roles (which sounds delightful, assuming someone wants to pay us for those things).

5. Limited data. They heard someone they trust say it and they're echoing the same sentiment.

6. They want to sound “cool”. Probably not the biggest reason people do it, but the follow-the-leader mentality carries on through here too.

I want to be able to say you’ll never be replaced, I want to be able to say it, but what’s often missing from these conversations, and what pushes a deeper answer a bit more to the forefront, is scale and timeline.

When someone says that “AI won’t replace you, a person using AI will,” ask them about scale and timeline. Ask them if that belief holds true for all roles, for all regions, for all experience levels, for all pay grades, and for all of eternity.

The pace of innovation in AI is hard to predict. Damn hard. And you only really start to appreciate that when you’ve done it for years. In fact, every year at Amazon, my team and I had to put out our AI recaps and forecasts for venture capitalists and internal executives. The State of AI Report from Nathan Benaich is one of the most impressive annual recaps and predictions I read every year (best suited for my technical readers, but anyone can enjoy). At 163 pages, it is a beast of a report and usually takes me hours to read and digest. I publicized my 2024 predictions at the beginning of the year, so you can read mine too.

But you don’t have to know exactly what will happen to know that change is coming. And personally, I think it’s better to assume bigger shifts and plan for change than to rest on your laurels and pray for infinite unwavering stability.

Bear with me. I want this to be a continued public conversation, and not executive whispers behind closed doors. So I’m going to say the scary thing out loud. If you want my predictions (subject to change), I believe AI will:

• Increase some current existing roles — especially artificial intelligence and machine learning roles. More folks like data scientists, machine learning engineers, and AI ethicists will be needed to develop, refine, and govern these systems. Enterprises are not (yet) willing to bestow all liability to an AI system or to a no-code platform.

• Augment some current roles — think about every role using AI (marketing managers, lawyers, recruiters, brokers, insurance and salespeople to name a few). Roles like these could - and do - use AI for content creation, campaign optimizations, document review, case research, candidate screening and matching, risk assessment, personalized recommendations. The list goes on. Nearly every role will become an AI-first version of that role, just like we saw happen with the internet.

• Decrease some current roles — especially tasks that are highly routine and predictable, like junior-level data entry. It's important to look at tasks and not just jobs, as many jobs will evolve rather than disappear entirely. This opens up some interesting questions about how career growth will shift over the coming years. Today, these positions exist to give entry-level workers exposure to the workforce while providing enterprises access to lower-salaried individuals who can lift some of the operational burden off. How will the transition from education to employment shift if/once fewer of these jobs exist? Will traditional colleges start teaching students skills typically attributed to more experienced employees - like strategy and creativity? Will students double down on technical STEM skills? Or will traditional education be eschewed in favor of specialized schools—like vocational trades (e.g., plumbing, carpentry), healthcare professions (e.g., nursing), or tech certifications (e.g., AI bootcamps)?

• Create some net-new roles — like an AI Operations Manager to oversee the deployment and monitoring of AI systems, or an AI Avatar Manager to design and manage virtual assistants and digital representatives, or an AI Agent Builder to just manage a fleet of agents. We'll also likely see new roles at the intersection of AI and various industries (e.g., AI Healthcare Specialist, AI Financial Advisor). I have already been working with my clients on listing brand-new jobs that have never existed. The world is changing fast, and new job families will be created.

• Have a scale in the hundreds of millions — a widely cited 2020 World Economic Forum stat predicted a net gain of 12 million jobs by 2035 (loss of 85M, gain of 97M), but that prediction was made before the explosive growth of tools like ChatGPT. So take it with a grain of salt. Or a whole shaker. More recent estimates, like the one from Goldman Sachs suggesting that 300 million jobs could be lost or diminished by 2030 may be more indicative of the scale we're expecting. The world is just shy of 8B people, and about 3.5B are employed, according to Statista, so my estimate is a near-term impact on 10-25% of the global employed.

• Have a timeline of decades — while I believe AI will ultimately create more jobs than it displaces or reduces, I also believe we will have a period of about 30-50 years of confusion, instability, and unique challenges. This won't be a smooth transition.

There are plenty of other stats out there on this topic, researched by organizations and groups with much larger budgets than mine. It’s worth sharing a few of those here:

• An Oxford study from 2013 ranked 702 jobs from least computerisable (aka able to be automated) to most computerisable. At the top (aka least likely to be automated) were recreational therapists, first-line supervisors of mechanics, installers, and repairers, emergency management directors, mental health and substance abuse social workers, audiologists, occupational therapists, orthotists and prosthetists, healthcare social workers, oral and maxillofacial surgeons, and first-line supervisors of fire fighting and prevention workers.

• A 2020 Canadian study found that women are reported to have a 10% higher risk of job loss as a result of automation.

• In August 2023, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and OpenAI found educated white-collar workers earning up to $80,000 a year are the most likely to be affected by workforce automation. They also found in that same study that ~80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of LLMs, while ~19% of workers may see at least 50% of their tasks impacted.

• A small survey from ResumeBuilder interviewed 750 business leaders and found that 37% of companies using AI say that AI replaced workers in 2023.

• The Microsoft CFO earlier this year said, “When you kind of take improvements at the gross margin level, plus this consistency of re-pivoting our workforce toward the AI-first work we're doing, without adding material number of people to the workforce, you end up with that type of leverage.”

• And a 160-page 2023 McKinsey study said: “Very few occupations—less than 5%—consist entirely of activities that can be fully automated. However, in about 60% of occupations, at least one-third of the constituent activities could be automated.”

We've been through technological revolutions before.

The key will be in how we manage this transition, and one way is to realize that AI is bringing about a full work and culture shift, not just a slick tool to use (more on this later).

So, how do you start to prepare for an AI-driven workforce shift?

You need to have both a near-term and a long-term strategy.

In the near term, I truly believe that becoming familiar with these tools and specifically how to use them in your role is one of the best things you can do.

I spoke with a startup CEO who, even for the exact same cost, said that they would rather hire one engineer who knows AI than five who don’t.

Similarly, the recent Moderna-OpenAI case study said that their company of nearly 6,000 employees is operating like a company of 100,000 people.

We need to recognize this 5-16x productivity gain, and use it to our advantage to improve efficiency, boost morale, reduce stress, and increase overall job satisfaction. And yes, stay competitive in the job market.

(Or, because it is totally an option, you can decide to go all Ron Swanson on it and reject all AI and only seek out hands-on, non-computerisable work…but then you might need to work for the city and hire an April to block your calls…)

Start integrating AI into your daily work. And I don't just mean trying ChatGPT once or twice. Or writing an email in poem form. I mean really digging in and finding ways to make it a core part of your workflow.

You need to put your hands on the keyboard and actually use it. You’ll learn what AI can do, what it can’t do, and be able to better predict what the future of AI might look like. And as technology advances, you'll be well-positioned to ride the wave instead of being overwhelmed by it.

Here are a few AI tips from my own life:

• A non-coder on my team has a dedicated virtual environment just for AI experiments. It's where we test out new models, fine-tune existing ones, and see what kind of results we can get. Having a separate environment makes it easy to dive in without worrying about messing up their main setup.*

• I read AI feeds daily and block off time each week for "AI exploration." This is when I read the latest papers, try out new tools, and brainstorm ways to apply AI to my work. Treating it like a scheduled task ensures I make consistent progress. If AI is not your full-time job, that’s totally fine, read a few news headlines every week and you’ll still be ahead of most folks. My top list of AI newsletters is here.

• I actively look for opportunities to use AI in my projects. Whether it's generating ideas, analyzing data, or automating tasks, I challenge myself to find at least one AI application in everything I do. The more I practice, the more natural it becomes.

• I share my AI learnings with my team. We have a dedicated Slack channel where we post interesting articles, share tips, and discuss potential use cases. Collaborating with others accelerates everyone's learning. Always Slack emoji reactions make me happy.

*Psst - never done this before? Here’s a challenge for you: head over to ChatGPT and ask for help getting set up. Check out my WISER framework if you need a refresher on prompting.

And what about a long-term AI strategy?

Ay, there’s the rub.

My two cents (or four cents at this point, wow this newsletter is a long one): the most important thing to do is to prepare for more volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity in the world. In practice, that looks like creating flexibility and adaptability in your life.

That means maintaining an open mind, understanding what resources you have access to and leveraging them, staying curious, and being willing to pivot. That means realizing that the productivity equation is changing, and you shouldn’t measure your worth by how many emails you can write in a day. That means having a support system in your life (which might be community, family, a partner, a therapist, a dog, a turtle, neighbors, church, classmates). That means embracing failure as a necessary part of this whole thing while cultivating resilience.

I am genuinely in a state of rethinking.

I’ve been sharing what it means to be an AI-first business with the world for years, and I’m now rethinking all of the rest—our AI-first mindsets, AI-first teams, AI-first work, AI-first countries, AI-first governments, and AI-first worlds. I see a future with a lot more real-time adaption, decentralization, global scalability, hyper-personalization, and resource circularity. And I’m working backwards to build the best strategy to future-proof myself and my community.

Final thoughts

The AI age is here, it's moving lightning-fast, and it’s not slowing down anytime soon.

Just this week, OpenAI and Google released a monumental amount of AI updates. And next week, Microsoft is likely to do the same.

Waiting for someone else to show you how to use it and how to adapt is a risky strategy. By starting now and consistently honing your skills, you'll be ready to thrive in the AI-powered world of work.

The future may be uncertain, but one thing is clear: AI is going to reshape the job market in profound ways.

Here's to building our AI muscles, one smart move at a time.

Allie

LAST CALL: Ready to lead in the AI age?

The May cohort for my "AI for Business Leaders" course has only 2 more days of enrollment and includes everything you need for AI implementation and leading your organization into the future.

This course includes 35 pre-recorded modules, 5 guest modules from industry experts, a live Q&A session with Allie, and free access to the Enterprise AI Mastery Toolkit.

Join me and leaders from Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, iHeart Media, Cargill, McKinsey, MetLife, ServiceNow, FedEx, Mastercard, LinkedIn, and more. They’re all in this cohort, and you should be learning with them. Enrollment ends in 2 days, so don’t miss out!

Tools, courses, and blogs that caught my eye:

Over the last few weeks, I’ve pulled together some of the top releases with my take on each one. Check it out.

1. OpenAI released GPT-4o, a new voice assistant, interactive spreadsheets, and more — OpenAI just released GPT-4o introducing enhancements to ChatGPT, including faster response times and extended capabilities even for free users (read it) (my thoughts)

2. Google bulldozed with 2 hours of AI releases — an AI model that’s 50% faster and 95% cheaper than GPT-4, a real-time video assistant prototype, an AI teammate that can complete tasks in Docs/Sheets, better photo search, AI summaries in normal search, Gmail summaries, and a Sora competitor (watch it) (my thoughts)

3. Anthropic releases their teams subscription — Anthropic's Teams subscription introduces access to all Claude 3 models, elevated usage limits, and forthcoming integrations with codebases and CRMs, but lacks native voice support, detailed data privacy, and shared GPT capabilities, presenting a mixed bag for SMBs and startups depending on specific needs and team size (read it) (my thoughts)

4. How to use AI to 10x your productivity — watch my free webinar to learn how to enhance your productivity 10-fold using AI, covering building an AI-first mindset, comparing pre-AI and with-AI workflows, and exploring practical prompt examples with various tools (sign up)

5. You can make pretty convincing AI music — Suno AI, a music creation platform, enabling users to generate realistic songs through text prompts, with new features in its v3 version allowing for 2-minute song creations on a free account; another option to test out is Udio, which allowed me to write a Broadway musical song about the plight of an entrepreneur in just a few minutes (try it) (my thoughts)

6. Top tools for AI-first workflows — a compiled list of my top AI tools, courses, newsletters, podcasts, voices in AI, books, community-endorsed tools, and top AI partners to stay ahead in the AI-first world, suitable for beginners and seasoned professionals alike (read it)

7. OpenAI releases ChatGPT customer story ft. Moderna — OpenAI released a ChatGPT customer story with Moderna, highlighting their ambitious goal for 100% AI adoption in just six months. They’ve already built 750 custom GPTs, and the average employee uses ChatGPT 3x per hour, significantly enhancing productivity across the organization (read it) (my thoughts)

8. Spotify’s new AI feature currently in beta — a new AI feature that allows users to generate custom 30-song playlists instantly using text prompts, providing a personalized listening experience based on genres, moods, activities, and more, currently available in beta for UK and Aussie Premium users (and enraging all Americans in the process) (read it) (my thoughts)

9. I was featured in Forbes helping folks get started in AI — the article title ‘10 Ways to Get Started in AI - without being technical’ features how anyone, regardless of background, can dive into AI. The piece highlights tips from testing tools to enrolling in courses to starting an AI venture, proving you don't need an engineering degree to find success in this field (read it) 

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