(CNN) — Meta. Nike. Intuit. UPS. It seems every day a new company announces layoffs, often citing AI as the cause. AI is already reducing US monthly payroll growth by roughly 16,000 jobs in the past year, according to a recent Goldman Sachs report.
Knowledge workers face the sharpest exposure, as their output is exactly what AI replicates best, at superhuman speed, around the clock.
“The most valuable jobs, the ones that we tell people to go to school for – software engineer, finance professional, accountant, lawyer – a lot of these cognitive professions, those are the ones that are the most vulnerable… to AI automation,” David Shrier, professor of AI & Innovation at Imperial College London, told CNN.
But humans will always be needed in some form – and there are steps you can take to increase the chances you’ll protect your own job.
Audit your role
Before you can future-proof your career, you need a clear-eyed view of what you do in your job. Think of jobs as a “collection of tasks we switch between, often many times a day,” Oded Nov, a professor of technology management at New York University, told CNN.
Consider which of those tasks are the most repeatable, rule-based computer tasks, like processing expense reports, which takes raw data and converts it into a different form. The more predictable a function, the more vulnerable it is to automation.
The CEO of Cloudflare wrote in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal that he recently laid off 20% of his work force, focusing on “measurers”: middle management and those who work on audits, operations, compliance, etc.
“AI isn’t coming for builders or sellers, but it is coming for measurers,” he wrote. “Tireless, independent, efficient and available, AI systems can now measure an organization with a level of objective detail and precision that was previously impossible even for the best employees.”
Some jobs, such as those in hospitality, healthcare and skilled trades, still need someone physically present to do much of the work. Robotics is at least a decade away from replacing those roles.
Invest in skills that are structurally hard to automate
After your self-audit, focus on skills that are not repeatable, predictable and rule based.
In addition to physical duties, AI is not yet as good at handling tasks that require emotional and social awareness, such as “understanding organizational culture or group dynamics,” Nov said.
AI tends to be recursive, rather than inventive or creative.
“AI is bad at creativity, but it’s surprisingly good at elaborating on creative prompts,” Shrier said. “But you still need the human to come up with the idea and guide the AI to do something interesting.”
Invest in those skills. If part of your job involves sales and convincing people to sign a contract, focus on the interpersonal skills that help you build trust with clients. Customers might go to AI to research, but they usually still want to deal with a human being when making big purchases.
Embrace AI and learn how to make it work for you
AI will soon become a pervasive part of our lives, just like the internet.
Get familiar with the major AI systems – ask various AI chatbots about your job and how they can help make your work more efficient, then give their suggestions a try. Play around with new coding tools that help you create your own app and website without needing to write your own code.
But chatbots aren’t what makes AI so useful in the workplace, it’s AI agents, or programs that run automatically, make decisions and take actions autonomously. You can learn how to make your own, and a chatbot can help. Try the prompt: “I want to learn how to make an AI agent. Walk me through the steps to create an agent that can do [specific task]”.
“In some ways it’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur, because if you can think of it, you can make it,” Shrier said. “There are people making robust enterprise-grade software that is built off of a prompt in plain English.”
Humans can’t be entirely replaced
Even roles that include a lot of AI-achievable tasks will still need humans in some way.
AI has particularly affected the coding industry. But Anthropic employees still edit and review code even if they’re not writing it, CEO Dario Amodei said at the World Economic Forum in January.
“In best-case scenarios, the more mundane tasks that are part of people’s jobs today will be handed over to AI, while the more interesting and rewarding tasks will be done by humans, probably with some support of AI,” Nov said. “It’s very likely, if history is a guide, that new jobs, consisting of new collections of tasks, will be created.”
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