The Future of Work With AI

“Will AI take your job?”
This is the question dominating headlines, office chitchats, and online communities. From mass layoffs in tech and HR to startups replacing staff with bots, full AI automation is here, and it is ruthless. But beneath the panic lies a more complicated truth: AI isn’t changing jobs uniformly. Some roles are vanishing, others are evolving, and a few remain stubbornly human. What is the future of work with AI?

The Current State of Work With AI

Before now, the answer to the “will AI replace your job?” question was that a human using AI will. Recently, many CEOs have stated that AI will definitely replace many roles.

The first casualties of AI automation were call center agents, data entry clerks, and basically jobs involving predictable, repetitive tasks that machines excel at. According to the World Economic Forum, the fastest-declining roles heavily influenced by AI and automation include various clerical and administrative roles.

Generative LLMs like ChatGPT have expanded the roles affected by AI to include the creative industry: writing, photography, drawing, music, and voice acting gigs have seen significant post reduction since people can now use AI tools to generate some of these.

Asides productivity gains and speed, companies replacing human workers with AI are also motivated by financial gains. Some of them have seen significant cost reduction since adopting and deploying AI across their services . An example is Microsoft’s 2024 The Business Opportunity of AI findings which showed that when organizations truly commit to and invest in AI, for every $1 it invests, it realizes an average return of $3.7.

Industries already seeing measurable AI impact include:

• Customer Support: Chatbots and voice agents are replacing first-level customer support service across banking, telecom, and e-commerce. 

In May this year, Klarna, a buy-now-pay-later fintech company replaced thousands of its employees with chatbots in a brazen AI experiment that failed. However, other companies have also reduced their investments in human customer support.  

Microsoft said it saved $500 million last year by using AI in its call centres.

• Media and Communications: Media companies like BuzzFeed and CNET experimented (controversially) with AI-generated articles, cutting human writers in the process. Several other non-media companies, like Duolingo, have also cut human content creators in an effort to harness the cost-cutting benefits of AI and present themselves as AI-first companies.

• Finance & Legal: Document review, auditing, and compliance checks are now routinely augmented or completed by machine learning tools, which can finish these tasks in a fraction of the time it would take a human to complete. Thus, slashing the need for juniors or interns in these industries.

• Human Resources: Still in May this year, IBM replaced 200 HR staff with AI agents named AskHR. They claim these agents automate more than 80 common HR processes like handling emails, pay statements, and employee paperwork.

These layoffs coincided with a broader layoff of 8,000 employees a few days later, but IBM still claims that AI is not causing their workforce to shrink.

• Marketing and Sales: Thousands of reported layoffs and job cuts in Microsoft, AWS, and Salesforce have been attributed to AI productivity gains. These companies are reducing the number of entry-level hires for sales roles as AI tools automate tasks such as lead scoring, pricing optimization, and customer onboarding.

Nest Labs CEO says that people now have to come on the job with experience.

This has always been what recruiters want. If we’re being sincere, it is easier to hire someone who knows the job than one you have to train. The difference with this and what his statement means is that companies now use AI for the roles typically filled by interns and juniors at a faster and more cost-effective rate. 

Jobs Being Reshaped By AI

But not all job disruption by AI  means replacement. AI has transformed how many white-collar roles are carried out. Think of marketing departments who now use AI to deliver hyper-personalised marketing and automate marketing decisions. Or doctors relying on diagnostic AI to speed up assessments because these tools have proven to be faster and even better at these tasks than humans.

Software engineers are increasingly coding alongside AI coding assistants and even generating codes from scratch. While teachers are supplementing traditional tutoring with AI-driven tutoring platforms.

The numerous job cuts and proposed layoffs resulting from AI advancements is evidence to support the claim that AI is replacing humans at work. However, the roles that have been replaced are those where little to no imagination is required, the tasks are repetitive and predictable, and also roles where AI can easily do the jobs better. 

When AI is deployed, automation gains simply mean that fewer hands are needed on the job. Hence, the layoffs.

The Jobs AI Will Not Take

Some industries remain surprisingly untouched by AI due to their inherently human-centered nature.

• Plumbers, electricians, and repair workers still rely on hands-on diagnostic skill and improvisation that AI can’t yet replicate.
  
• Early childhood educators and elder caregivers bring emotional labor, care, and safety judgment that machines struggle to emulate.
  
• Strategists, C-suite executives, and leaders must navigate nuance, unpredictability, and ethical decisions beyond current AI capabilities.
  

These jobs are safe for now, not because AI can’t theoretically do them, but because deploying that level of artificial general intelligence at scale remains deeply resource-intensive. And as AI deployment becomes widespread, humans on the job will become premium.

AI’s Current Limitations

Even as AI tools evolve rapidly, their adoption faces real-world friction:

• Compute constraints: Training advanced models like GPT-4 requires vast GPU infrastructure, mostly controlled by a few players (NVIDIA, TSMC, Google).
• Energy demands: AI consumes enormous electricity, and currently, electricity supply is a limited and shared resource.
• Global inequality: Developing countries often lack the infrastructure to adopt advanced AI at a meaningful scale.
• Overhype: Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, predicts that within a year, AI will become so automated in programming that it will no longer require human guidance, thereby putting coding jobs at the highest risk of being replaced by AI. This week, we had Replit AI deleting SaaStr.AI’s production database and modifying codes without permission. Essentially, a case of AI going rogue and covering it up.
  

The Future of Work By 2030

Regardless of the challenges facing AI’s growth and adoption, its continued improvement will lead to widespread changes in jobs. According to the WEF Future of Work 2025 Report, while 92 million jobs are projected to disappear by 2030, 170 million new ones will be created, resulting in a net growth of 78 million jobs. 

The obvious urgent plan is reinvention because AI is going to remove the need for some roles. While emerging and newer roles like Big Data Scientist, AI and ML Engineer, Security Management Specialist, and Data Warehousing Specialist, among others, are going to be in demand faster than universities and upskilling platforms can train people.

For a more in-depth scope on emerging roles due to AI adoption, see the World Economic Forum‘s Future of Work 2025 Report, Jobs Outlook.

How to Evolve With AI and Keep Your Job

Build something, then get hired:

As AI increasingly reduces the need for companies to hire for entry-level roles, getting a job will mean years of experience or a set of precise skills in high demand. But, to gain experience, you must have had a job. Egg before chicken! 

If we were lamenting about how difficult it is to get a job, think about how life will be for the next crop of graduates.

But AI frontliners like Alexandr Wang (formerly of ScaleAI, now Meta) are redefining the path to employment. I think we should borrow a strategy from their story which is to build something, then get hired. Essentially building something relevant while you learn, so you can become a valuable hire

Experiment with AI tools:

Even non-tech professionals will need to become more comfortable using AI in their jobs, such as doctors using AI to run diagnostics more efficiently. Evolving with AI will require rapid training and lifelong learning, even in the absence of a structured environment, as well as skills to evaluate the performance of the AI tool.

We already have stories of people not getting hired because they have not significantly incorporated AI into their workflow, and companies love being on trend.

Upskill and reskill:

Start with micro-certifications from Coursera, edX, or DataCamp. If you’re in a vulnerable role, don’t wait. Reskilling and upskilling are now lifelines. Thanks to online learning platforms, learning how to use AI tools and understanding how to work with AI may be the difference between remaining relevant and becoming obsolete in your current role.

Show your work:

Build publicly, write case studies, and let recruiters see your evolution.

The Future of Work Is Blended

The better question isn’t “will AI take my job?” but “how will AI change the way I work?”

A lot of our daily tasks are being run through AI tools to optimize or “make it better”. No human can compete with that, and no one can genuinely undermine the role of artificial intelligence in workplaces. Working with AI tools or having AI as an assistant is not a trend that will go away. Better and bigger versions of the current tools we use will occupy more space in our work lives as the years pass.

For now, AI can only perform tasks that are related to its training data. Until Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is achieved, it cannot replace humans in more complex and demanding tasks, and it still requires human oversight and guardrails to perform optimally.

Like every major technological leap before now, artificial intelligence will upend some industries, create others, and leave a few untouched. But the bottom line is this: humans who adapt will continue to matter.

Those who don’t will be relegated to the background – jobless, and wishing they had made the switch sooner.