How should you prepare to survive and thrive with AI? The truth is, your future promotion depends on how you manage AI. It does not depend on how fast you type. It’s also even about how creative you are.
CEOs see models trimming routine tasks while opening new operational opportunities. That makes sense because as people learn to be more efficient, they will undoubtedly become more productive. That will open up a whole new level of tasks we weren’t able to do before. When we went from horses to cars, all of a sudden trucking and shipping opened up new industries.
Stay Flexible
If you choose to stay shallow, then expect your role to compress, or go away. If you’re paying attention anywhere, watch what happens in software development. The same changes happening there will end up proliferating everywhere.
And right now data is at the center of all this. In their latest move, for example Meta’s just spent $5 B on Scale AI, a data labeler. When a company spends this type of money, it should be a signal. Ask yourself how to apply that in your future. Consider how to apply that in your business. AIs work by absorbing massive amounts of context and there’s a lot of that in your business. Learning how to act based on data should be a priority for those willing to last.
Why Agents won’t replace Engineers
Agents will change how we do everything. You can see that in the rise of vibe coding for prototypes. Engineers are still needed for modules the business can trust. That’s never going away. It’s becoming clear that the same thing is happening elsewhere. I’m not sure you’ll ever fully trust an AIs output. Moreover, the problem is not so much the output, it’s the volume they can generate.
Think of it like this. How many times have you had a hard time finding anything good to watch. Quantity isn’t the problem, the lack of quality is. AIs are going to exponentially increase the amount of content. That doesn’t mean that content is going to be good. AI output must only ship after human sign off. AIs are a smart helper with infinite context, but it’s almost too much knowledge.
I don’t believe there will be no more juniors. It seems illogical. We will expect Juniors to have a deeper understanding of the process. Mentors will need to work with juniors to police the models instead of writing beginner code.
AI results are great, but human context will now and forever matter more than syntax.
