When I was teaching, I had a student who’d always ask the same question.
“What’s the minimum amount of work I need to do to complete this assignment?”
It’s the kind of question that sounds practical on the surface but reveals something deeper about how you approach your work.
I think that’s the same question a lot of people are asking about AI right now. “How much of my job can AI do for me?” And just like in my classroom, it’s the wrong question.
The Layoff Wave Nobody’s Framing Correctly
Let’s look at what’s actually happening. Amazon cut roughly 30,000 corporate jobs over the past year, citing AI efficiency gains. Block slashed 40% of its workforce, going from 10,000 to fewer than 6,000 employees. Dell eliminated 11,000 positions. The list keeps going.
In Q1 of 2026 alone, over 52,000 tech workers lost their jobs, a 40% increase over last year. About a fifth of those cuts were explicitly tied to AI.
And here’s the part that should make you pay attention: a Harvard Business Review survey found that over 600 executives admitted to making layoffs based on AI’s potential, not its current performance.
The Wrong Question
People are salivating over AI doing all their work for them. But here’s what they’re not thinking about: companies hire you and keep you based on value. The more you provide, the safer you are.
If you automate everything you do, they no longer need you.
It’s not about having more time for your cross-stitch or your video games. The question shouldn’t be “how do I do less?” It should be “how much more value can I provide if I use AI?”
History Has Seen This Before
We’ve been through this. Multiple times. During the Industrial Revolution, the workers who thrived were the ones who developed specialized skills that were hard to replace.
The pattern across 150 years of technological disruption: the labor-displacing effect of technology is more than offset by new roles and opportunities, but only for people who step into them.
What I Told That Student
You know what I told that student who kept asking for the minimum? I said if I tell you the minimum amount of work, I can also give you the minimum grade.
That’s exactly what you don’t want to hear from your boss.
These tools are changing fast. They’re making you more efficient, yes. But people don’t keep you because you’re the most efficient. They keep you because you provide the most value.
The people who come out ahead in every technological transition share one trait: they treat the disruption as an opportunity to do more, not less. They don’t ask “what’s the minimum?” They ask “what’s now possible?”
What are you doing with the time AI saves you?
