Evolve your habits to AI, or lose your job to AI
“Will AI take my job?”
Probably.
Most corporate departments will be slashed. A team of ten will be replaced by a team of two — supported by a roster of AI agents. The question isn't if this will happen, but whether you'll be indispensable when it does. Here’s your strategy to ensure you are wielding the power of AI rather than getting replaced by it:
Step 1: Build the AI-First Habit
In the early 1990’s, the solution to every problem lay in the library’s racks and stacks. The people who continued running to the library after Google appeared were left behind. Don’t be one of those people.
Instead, change your paradigm from “I’ll handle it!” to “Can AI handle it?”
Need to write a contract? Give it to ChatGPT first.
Need to debug code? Give it to ChatGPT first.
Need feedback on your presentation? Give it to ChatGPT first.
Your initial interactions might be lackluster. You’ll probably get amateurish results. Don’t get discouraged. The AI is not dumb — you just don’t know how to use it yet. But you will!
Your first attempts at using AI might be akin to someone in 2002 Googling: “I heard a song on the radio this morning that goes 'doo doo doo,' what is it?”
Don’t give up.
As this practice becomes a habit, you’ll learn how to add massively more context parameters and specificity in your prompting. You’ll learn that you can upload screenshots and csv files. You’ll learn to appreciate the speech-to-text accuracy of the little headphones icon in ChatGPT, and you’ll rarely type again.
You’ll start paying attention to the latest specialized tools hitting AI news cycles, like Devin for coding, Adept for enterprise knowledge work, and Perplexity for instant research. You might even get sucked into making your own custom GPTs for common workflows.
The more you throw at it, the more attuned you become to how it reasons, and the better you become at tool selection and prompts.
Before you know it, you’ve gone from tinkerer to master.
Today’s tinkerer is tomorrow’s master.
Step 2: Brand Yourself as an AI Early Adopter
Company leaders are just as scared as you are. They know AI is coming, but they don’t know who will lead the evolution in their teams. They are looking for curious early adopters, and this is your chance to raise your hand.
This is the once-in-a-lifetime moment in history where the learning curve for AI is highly approachable.
Take website development as an analogy: to create a nice website today, you’d need to know html, javascript, React, and css/scss, not to mention a server-side framework like Python/Django and a dev-ops toolkit like Docker/Heroku. The learning curve is steep, and requires months’ long boot camps just to get in the game.
But, in 1995, any high school kid who knew basic HTML could charge businesses $500 to “build their website”.
Today is your 1995 moment. The LLM application layer is realistically less than 2 years old. A decade from now, there will be layers of complexity. You will need a “Masters in LLM Engagement” to be taken seriously. Today, you just need to know how to optimize a prompt written in plain English.
Position yourself as the person presenting about AI at all-hands team meetings. Ensure you are involved when the company evaluates AI tooling. Be the person who wields the AI, so you’re not the person who is replaced by AI.
Be the person who wields the AI, so you’re not the person who is replaced by AI.