Will AI eat your lunch?

AI is going to take jobs. On your team. Maybe even yours. What are you doing about it?

We talk about how AI is going to make people more efficient. It will.

The common messaging is that it's not going to replace people, it will just make people that much more effective. That’s true in the long run, but in the short and medium term, companies will be hiring less because existing people will do more with less.

It’s going to take some time for economies, companies and the workforce to adjust to the new reality AI brings to the world. There will be large scale shake ups in every business and industry as they try to predict what it means for them.

Junior SOC analysts openings? Not going to be seeing many of them as companies like Dropzone and Prophet Security make moving those roles from people to software the obvious choice.

Junior developers? Hard to see the role continuing to exist in 2 years as it does now when Copilot bangs out the basics better than any developer with a couple of years of experience can.

Paralegals? Basic research, document analysis and reviews, all done at human speed isn’t exactly something you’ll be itching to pay a person for.

The biggest direct hits are going to continue working up from the bottom but regardless of where you sit, AI will be affecting all jobs in some way.

Trying to stop it is an exercise in futility so the question becomes “How will I adapt to this reality?”

Accept that more than ever, change is the one thing you can count on.

You need to live in a state of adaptability.

The future is no place for rigidity or “This is how we’ve always done things”.

Today’s impossibility is very likely to be quite possible in a not-too-distant future.

Constantly think about how AI can be leveraged to improve every aspect of your and your team’s work.

Ensure you know enough about AI to understand what’s possible, where you’ll hit problems and how the rapidly accelerating trajectory of AI capabilities will change those assumptions over time.

What does an LLM or LLM backed system need to do a part of your job well?

Don’t shy away from this, embrace it.

Work that an LLM can do with the right context is the exact work that will quickly become commoditized.

Today is the worst that LLMs will ever be. They’re going to continue improving at a pace we have a hard time even conceptualizing. It was only a couple years ago that ChatGPT amazed us by being able to put together a coherent sentence. 2 years later and it’s building apps, solving complex puzzles and teaching people new skills.

Think ahead then act now based on what’s coming. Offload what makes sense so you can focus on the higher value work that AI can’t do (yet).

Go to where the ball will be, not where it is.