Everyone’s afraid AI is coming for their people.
It’s the wrong fear.
Every major technological shift in history added jobs, it didn’t kill them. It’s called Luddite fallacy.
Here’s what is true:
The nature of work is changing faster than any shift before it. The internet took 13 years to get to 800m users. ChatGPT has 800m users in a little over 2.1 years.
The reason is simple. This is the first major human evolution (agrarian, industrial, Knowledge) that hasn’t come with a large financial barrier to entry.
Access to AI costs $20 a month and it’s available to everyone right now.
AI Adoption by the population is outpacing AI Integration at workplaces.
It feels disorienting.
And on the other side, odds are you will need people.
The IMF says that 60% of jobs in advanced economies will materially change in the next two years. The World Economic Forum says we’ll lose 90m jobs and gain an additional 170m jobs.
So you’ll need people. But those people will need different skills. And fast.
We’re moving from doing the work to conducting the work. AI will do much of the heavy lifting. Our people will frame and verify.
From individual contributor to conductor.
That’s a very different skill set. And most organizations aren’t building it yet.
The leaders who figure that out first have a real advantage. The ones who don’t will wonder why their AI investment isn’t paying off.
