The Upcoming AI Job Squeeze
When we talk about AI coming for knowledge workers, I think it is essentially a misnomer. It’s not AI alone that is likely to be coming for the jobs of knowledge workers, but instead, it’s likely other knowledge workers who can leverage the power of AI to do more, better, and faster work than those who haven’t adapted to the brave new world.
To be sure, some jobs that might feel like knowledge work will be decimated by AI. For example, if your job is to move some set of data from one place, perform some function on it, and then deposit it somewhere else, you are prime for displacement by AI. AI will likely replace you in short order if your job is purely research-based and generates a data set without any value added. Those jobs will feel the deepest squeeze, likely very shortly.
But what about jobs with expert knowledge that add value to research or other data sets? They will feel less of a squeeze in the short term by AI, but in the intermediate term, they will likely be optimized by people using AI to accomplish the work in a fashion that will displace those workers without AI skills and who have not integrated AI tools into their workflows. Eventually, though, in most cases, in the longer term, as the accessibility of AI systems increases and the cost of training AI tools on custom processes and data sets decreases, the AI tools will likely consume most of those…
