The Career You Spent 20 Years Building Just Got A New Expiry Date

I was recently interviewed by an Australian media publication about the ways AI will reshape our workforce.

I’m reposting the conversation below.

If you’re worried about your career – and want strategies for protecting it – this Q&A will help you think about the future more clearly.

What is the value of work in the age of AI?

A lot of human workplace value used to live in production.

You got praise for sending memos, managing busywork, producing spreadsheets and making PowerPoint presentations.

Even if production wasn’t directly your job (e.g., designer), it likely contained a significant amount of production work (e.g., sales teams preparing for client meetings and creating tenders).

(Related: How To Get More Job Interviews And Job Offers).

AI made production cheap and abundant. Anyone can now produce a slick deck or a clean prototype in minutes. So human value relocates to three things:

To preserve your career, you need to be strong in at least two of these domains. If you want to be a rare asset, you need to be a master of all three.

What does the future of jobs look like in an AI-driven economy?

For entry-level workers, work will shift from doing tasks to managing AI agents. 

There will be fewer mid-level managers, and the survivors will do less busywork and more architecting of hybrid agentic/human teams.

Executives will – for the first time in history – be capital allocators of companies with near-infinite production capacity. Their job will shift from asking “can we build it?” to “what is actually worth building?”

Once the decision is made, their role will be to lead rapid, iterative experiments that validate or refute it.

How will people earn a living as certain roles and salary structures evolve or disappear?

Let me give you the bad news. A lot of people will lose their jobs – despite what Sam Altmans of the world are telling us.

Software developers and content writers are feeling it already, with most now spending their days managing agents instead of writing code or polishing prose.

The good news is that it won’t be an “everyone is out of work” scenario. It will be a flip in what we view as scarce.

For a century, production talent was expensive and scarce. Soon, talent will be available on demand for a price approximating the cost of electricity.

That’s where the money will be – you’ll earn a living by climbing out of the doing and into the judging.

What are your broader thoughts on the future of work?

My view is that the standard career pathways will reorder.

For decades, people followed a similar preordained path: school, tertiary education, then the corporate world. A few weirdos like me decided to rebel and become entrepreneurs.

I think it will shift to: school, tertiary/entrepreneurship hybrid stint.

People with an aptitude for entrepreneurship will continue on that track. People who don’t will get corporate jobs.

Here’s my logic. If the most valuable skill ahead is judgement, you won’t be able to obtain it from theory. You’ll need first-hand experience.

So you will fund your own apprenticeship by building something – while you’re at uni. And unis, fighting their own fight for survival and relevance, will have no choice but to teach this skillset.

And I’m not talking about more Bachelor of Business (Entrepreneurship) programs taught by stuffy professors who read every book by Cialdini but have never set foot outside academia.

For the next generation of students, that will be freeing: their degree won’t be an empty credential to wave around, but evidence of their ability to build.

Steven