“Well, soon I will be out of a job anyway.”
A comment at the end of the meeting. It comes out as a joke, in the tone of someone who does not want an answer.
Then they are out of the door and everyone moves on.
It was perhaps the most honest thing said in that meeting, and it vanished into thin air in less than two seconds.
You are not the only one thinking it
Pew Research asked 5,273 employed adults in the US in late 2024 how they expect AI to affect their working lives. About a third, 32%, said they expect it to mean fewer opportunities for them.
One in three. Not a fringe worry, and almost none of them will say so in a meeting either.
So people look for answers somewhere else, and what they find online is no use. One side is certain it is over. The other is three tools deep and faintly amused by everyone who is not. Both are loud, because loud is what gets shared, and neither one is really helpful to you.
What survives all that noise is a single instruction. Learn AI.
It is not bad advice. It just skips the part you are actually stuck on.
The fear is reasonable. Something real is changing in how your work gets done and you are responding to an actual signal, not imagining one.
The problem is that right now it is one large shapeless thing. Shapeless is what makes it frightening, and what makes it impossible to do anything about.
Take it apart and it stops being a mood and becomes a problem. A problem you can work with.
Separate what you know from what you assume
There are two ways to take a fear apart and they do different jobs.
First principles thinking means stripping something back to what you actually know is true and building again from there. The five whys is root cause analysis. You take the symptom and keep asking why until you reach the thing underneath it.
Use them in that order.
Start with what you could prove to another person. Your company has announced something. A tool now does in four minutes what used to take you an afternoon. Both facts.
Now write down everything else you believe about your situation. It will feel just as true as the facts did.
If a system does the matching, what am I even here for. They will keep the ones who are good at the clever parts. I have done the same job for six years, so that is what I am.
None of those are facts. They are beliefs.
And the beliefs are what you drill. Not external events.
Drill it the way you would drill a broken process
You already know how to do this. When a report comes out wrong you do not stand there describing how wrong it looks. You go upstream until you find where it broke.
Why do I think they will not need me anymore?
Because AI will do my tasks.
Why do I believe AI can do my tasks?
Because most of what I do is routine.
Why is most of what I do routine?
Because that is what I have always done.
Why should the next set of responsibilities not go to me?
Because there are smarter and more experienced people than me.
The number of questions is not the point. Keep going until the answer stops being about your circumstances and starts being about you. That is the belief, and the belief is what is actually in your way.
And look at what came back. There are smarter and more experienced people than me.
That has nothing to do with AI. It did not arrive with the technology. It has been sitting there for a long time, quietly making decisions on your behalf, and it took an external event to make it audible.
What is usually down there
Three things, mostly. Whichever one you hit is your floor, and which floor it is changes what you should focus on.
Sometimes it is control. Not the job, the how. You have built a way of working that is yours and something is about to rearrange it without asking you.
Sometimes it is the unknown. Not the technology itself, the newness of it. You cannot picture the version of your work that comes next, so your mind fills the gap with the worst available draft.
And sometimes it is not being good enough, which was there long before any of this arrived. If that is your floor, no amount of information will touch it, because it was never an information problem.
Which one is yours? You will know within about four minutes of asking honestly.
The part neither camp mentions
Before you decide what to do about what you found, it helps to know what you are actually up against.
A while ago I was in a Teams meeting going through invoice approvals and accounting rules, looking at what we could automate.
The IT expert on the call said, amused: “It is funny how many people believe AI is just going to fix everything. But the reality is if you have messy data you will get messy output. AI is not going to fix that.”
I laughed, because it was obviously true. I had just never heard anyone say it out loud.
That is the part missing from both online camps. A handful of companies really are far ahead. Most are running one careful pilot in one department, with messy data, a process nobody has ever written down and no agreement about who owns the output. Getting from there to anything like a full overhaul is years of work, and every year of it needs people who understand how the work actually happens.
Which is where your floor turns into something to do.
If it was control, the control has not gone. It has moved. Somebody still has to look at what comes back and decide whether it is right, and that somebody has to know the process well enough to spot when it is not. That is a different role, not a smaller one. Work out which parts of this stay yours and put your attention there.
If it was the unknown, learn how these systems actually operate and where they break. What they do well, what they do badly, why a human stays in the loop and what that human is for. The unknown shrinks the moment it has edges.
If it was not being good enough, the belief needs handling before the skill does. It is usually not about AI at all. It is an old appraisal, a manager who made you feel slow, a comparison you never put down.
A belief like that is a sentence you have repeated for years without ever testing whether it is true. You do not argue your way out of it. You write a more accurate one and start acting on that instead, something as ordinary as this. I am not an expert yet, and I can learn. Then pick the skill, and pick the date.
Two years from now
In two years you will be somebody. That person is being built right now, out of what you decide this week and then do again next week.
You can let the fear run and let the announcements and the pilots and the loud voices decide what happens to you. That is still a decision. It just does not feel like one while you are making it.
Or you can find your floor, take the one action that follows from it, and repeat it until it changes what you are capable of. Not a transformation. One small thing, often.
The version of you that is not afraid of this is not braver than you are. They just started earlier.
So what are you actually afraid of, and what is one thing you can do today about it?
Finding your own floor is harder alone than it looks, because whatever is down there has been protecting you for a long time and it does not want to be looked at directly. It is also where the breakthroughs happen.
If you would rather start on your own, the Redesign Loop Step-by-Step guide takes you through the same four stages at your own pace.
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