Hidden Job Risks: A New Threat
How secretly at risk is your job? Obviously, any employee worries about things like layoffs or companies going out of business or the market changing. But there’s a secret hidden risk to your job that is not talked about too often, and that’s AI, artificial intelligence. Sure, you’ve heard about it. You may have some concerns about it taking over employment opportunities. But you’re probably not that urgently worried about AI taking over your job tomorrow. You might worry about some other applicant taking over your job but not AI.
The Reality of AI’s Threat
Even if it doesn’t happen tomorrow, the probability of that happening is a lot higher than any other risk. Here’s an article from Fortune Magazine, a major financial publication, saying that half of bosses plan to fire and replace you with AI in the next five years. Actually, the subheadline is higher than that—70% of bosses surveyed plan to hire staff with AI. So, they might not be looking to replace you at 70%; they’re looking to replace you at 50%. But they’re going to hire AI.
Limited AI Awareness Among Bosses
A couple of things to keep in mind: This is based on what bosses know about AI right now. Many bosses don’t know that much about AI. They don’t know what it can do; they don’t know how advanced it is. Once they start hiring people that are AI employees—not people, but actually AI agents—and they start to see, “Hey, wait a minute, this AI stuff can do more than I thought it could,” this statistic might actually go up. They might be looking to fire more employees sooner than five years.
AI’s Unexpected Job Replacements
You might think, “Well, my job is not a tech job; I don’t need to worry about it.” Some of the jobs we’ve seen replaced with AI—teachers, wait staff, programmers—were not jobs that were expected to be replaced. Here’s the other thing: Even if your particular job can’t be fully done by artificial intelligence, what companies will do is consolidate human jobs. For example, if you have a staff of 10 and three of the people can be completely eliminated with AI, the other seven may…
Workforce Consolidation with AI
Maybe a third of their job can be done by AI. You get rid of those three. You take the other seven and consolidate that group of seven down to three. Each person can do multiple jobs because AI can help and enable that. Either way, the workforce will shrink.
Preparing for the AI Workforce
The point is, there may not be much you can do about it today, but you do have to have some kind of a plan of how you’re going to live with the reality of artificial intelligence in the workforce.
Skill Up: Operating AI Agents
A couple of things you can do: Number one is learn how to run and operate AI agents. Somebody’s going to have to run these. The boss, the CEO, the general manager is probably not going to be hands-on running the AI day-to-day. Even many tech people, IT departments, don’t know how to run AI.
Gain a Unique Opportunity
Even if they did, they’re not the same mindset as management—as creative as project management. They’re more tech-oriented, tedious work-oriented. So, if you take it upon yourself to learn how to run AI artificial intelligence agents, when the boss starts to mix those in, you might have a unique opportunity to be highly valued and needed.
Leverage AI for a Side Hustle
As you’re learning how to run AI, figure out how to use it to do a side hustle where you don’t have to spend that much time. There was an article last week that said within the next five years, there will be the first artificial intelligence single-employee company that does a billion dollars. Not a million—about a billion. There’s already AI companies that do a million dollars in sales. A billion is the next threshold.
Upgrade Your Lifestyle with AI
You don’t need a billion or even a million. If you can find an AI-type agent job that works for you, that makes $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a year, that’s like a free job for doing nothing. Third thing you can do is figure out how to use artificial intelligence to upgrade your lifestyle. Even if it’s not making you money, if you can make it improve the efficiency of your life, then you may not need as much of a job. You don’t need as much income because your life is handled for you.
Planning for the AI Era
Either way, there may be other examples too. Start to plan for artificial intelligence.
