Everyone has the last job

I keep having conversations lately in which my conversation partner attempts to convince me that they — and they alone — have the last job that AI won’t be able to do. Everyone else? Totally screwed. But their job! Their job is the sacred thing that requires a human soul and imagination that AI will never have.

And yet.

Remember when AI first started to come into the mainstream, and we all said, “Glad I’m not a truck driver! They’re all screwed.” (Well, at least, those of us who weren’t truck drivers.) “Glad I’m a creative who thinks for a living! We’ll never be replaced,” we said, brimming with the naivety and confidence of people who knew not what exponential thing this way came.

I had an investor tell me that AI could not possibly outdo his job because it could never really understand the nuances of picking great companies. Investors, by the way, are genuinely terrible at picking great companies¹. I had a Chief Transformation Officer at a Fortune 500 explain why only a human could ever possibly think of the strategy and manage the complex execution of the CTO office. CTOs, by the way, are terrible at delivering transformations². I had a tradesperson confidently tell me that trades will be the last bastion of humanity because there’s no way a robot could ever possibly be as flexible as a human. Tradespeople are generally much better at their jobs than VCs and CTOs, at least outcomes-wise, but AI robots are coming for those jobs too. Here’s Figure1’s Helix autonomously unloading a dishwasher (sign me up):

Being replaced by AI is the wrong way to think about it. Being augmented by AI is a much better framing. For the next while, at least, you’re not going to lose your job to an AI, but you might lose it to someone using AI better than you. I don’t agree with everything Matt Shumer said in Something Big is Happening, but I very much agree that you (yes, you) should be spending time experimenting and understanding what’s possible now so that you’re the one leading the way.

I often think about my friend Mark Raheja’s framing of roles not souls. We get very focused on our job titles as part of our identities. The VP of Somesuch has worked very hard to move up from Senior Director of Somesuch and has their eyes squarely set on SVP. Being in charge of Somesuch defines who they are, though it’s really their role, not their soul (and it’s more likely an assembly of roles that they concurrently hold). AI will force us to separate those more as the roles we’ve been so tied to no longer represent who we are. We’re going to have to find new small-talk icebreaker questions when “So, what do you do?” is no longer about how we earn money but about how we define ourselves.

Your role is not where the sacred flame of humanity burns. LLMs as we know them are a little over three years old, and they’re already replacing the coders who made them, generating incredible 4k videos, passing the legal bar, solving physics problems, etc., etc., etc. You will not have the last job held by a human. But your soul will continue! Start figuring out what it wants.

75% of venture-backed companies never return cash to investors, according to Harvard Business School researcher Shikhar Ghosh, who studied a dataset of 2,000 VC-backed startups. Even worse, in 30–40% of cases, investors lose every dollar they put in. ↩
Bain’s 2024 analysis found that 88% of business transformations fail to achieve their original ambitions. ↩

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