Work Has Changed. Have You?
Redefine your role before someone automates it.
Tasks Won’t Protect Your Job
You're good at what you do. You put in the work. You hit deadlines, build decks, reconcile data, write docs, manage the next launch and so much more.
You’ve built your reputation on execution. You must be essential.
But here’s the thing: execution is getting cheaper. And that’s nothing to do with your time and effort being worthless. It’s only because machines can now do parts of your job much faster, more accurately, and at scale.
McKinsey reports that up to 70% of current work activities can be automated.
What used to be “doing your job well” is starting to look a lot like an operating expense ripe for optimization.
So if more than half of your job is automate-able today, what are you still doing manually and why?
Now, You Pivot
You don’t get a memo when the paradigm shifts.
It shows up in what teams stop doing. It starts with tools that feel “innovative”.
A dev team gets an AI assistant that writes production-ready code. An analyst wakes up to interactive dashboards built overnight. A PMM (me) uses a prompt to analyze customer feedback in under a minute.
Satya Nadella said it flatly,
As AI gets more efficient and accessible, its use will skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can't get enough of.
But the big insight is the higher the efficiency, the bigger the appetite.
Welcome to Jevons Paradox. In the 1800s, economist William Stanley Jevons noticed that as steam engines got more efficient, coal consumption didn’t drop as expected. It exploded. And therefore, counterintuitively, the more efficient a process becomes, the more it’s consumed.
Automation is shifting the nature of the work we do. What was once a win becomes a given. More campaigns, more analyses, more releases - not because the business grew, but because the friction dropped. For many, it has become synonymous with ‘losing job’. And this is what most of us have misunderstood about automation.
That mindset is holding people back more than the tech ever could. If you’re still measuring your value in tasks completed, you really need to catch up. The market is rapidly shifting toward smarter systems and outcome-first thinking.
Call it a trite but “work smarter, not harder” has never been more real.
Free Yourself From Repetitive Loops
The first instinct most people have toward automation is resistance.
If the function writes itself dynamically, where does that leave a developer?
If an LLM can write the copy, what’s the value of a writer?
If the data’s already analyzed, what’s left for an analyst to figure out?
Fair questions and the honest answer is if your job is defined by what a machine can do, it’s already under pressure, automated or not.
But there’s a deeper issue. The fear of identity.
Execution is often how we prove our worth. A well-built dashboard. A perfectly executed launch. A detailed audit report. These become the currency of credibility. Letting go of tasks you’ve mastered can feel like surrendering control (and pride).
But here’s what automation can’t do:
Set priorities
Understand nuance
Create strategy
Build consensus
Make tradeoffs
Spot gaps before they become fires
Discerning professionals don’t fear automation. They use it to move upstream. If you're clinging to execution as your safety net, you're standing in the way of your own growth.
Offload the repetition. Let automation handle the motions while you focus on creating value at scale.
Copy What’s Working (Peers, Proof and Pattern)
Look around. The people making the biggest career leaps right now aren’t busy doing more. They’re learning faster and acting smarter.
Sometimes it’s a teammate who demoed their new Zapier workflow. Sometimes it’s proof like case studies, pilot projects, a free trial. And sometimes, it’s hard data:
With 20% efficiency gain, JPMorgan freed up talent for high-value projects
30% cost reduction; ANZ Bank redeployed staff to strategy and compliance
You don’t need to find a mentor. You need a pattern, a “network of mentors.” You could be:
The product manager who automated reporting and used the reclaimed hours to design and test hypotheses around user behavior; uncovering why a feature wasn’t landing and turning it into one that did.
The engineer who escaped deployment cycles and now shapes long-term technical direction; judging tradeoffs, anticipating scale challenges, and guiding architecture choices that no tool could predict.
The marketer who stopped building decks and started shaping strategy by translating AI-generated insights into executive narratives that actually drive decisions and win stakeholder buy-in.
So yes, it works. Yes, it scales. And no, you’re not going to be relevant if you wait too long.
What’s the Task You Dread?
This is the moment when it clicks.
Now that you’ve done the homework, you’ve seen what others are doing: automating, delegating, moving faster. You’re no longer asking if automation helps; you’re wondering where to start.
Start here: What’s one task I never want to do manually again?
Pick something small. One report. One workflow. One thing you still do every week that doesn’t need to be manual anymore.
What changes is how you think about your role.
You stop measuring value in tasks crossed off. You start thinking in systems, leverage, and outcomes. What once felt like “the job” now looks more like setup. The real work is figuring out what’s worth your time.
That moment of clarity? That’s your ‘Aha’ moment.
Once you’ve experienced what it feels like to automate the routine and use that time to think more clearly, build more strategically, or collaborate more intentionally; you won’t go back.
One well-placed automation flips the script on how you work and what you’re worth.
That’s your first real win, and a smarter use of your time.
Solve Once, Scale Forever
Let’s be clear on one thing, your first automation won’t be perfect. It’s not supposed to be. That’s not failure, but a call for iteration. And iteration is the engine of strategic growth.
You’ll get things wrong. A script crashes. A workflow misfires. Someone asks why it took two hours to fix something that was supposed to “save time.”
Good. That’s data!
Iteration is feedback made actionable. It's how you move from reactive to proactive and shift to becoming someone who refines systems, raises the bar, and compounds returns. This is the inflection point where skills become judgment. You’re now designing how the work evolves.
The more you iterate, the more fluency you build. You stop duct-taping solutions and start making durable ones. You think further ahead. You move faster and smarter. You go from solving for symptoms to solving for systems.
That’s when people notice. You become the person who makes work work better. You don’t hoard efficiency, you share it. You earn trust by repeating a simple pattern: solve once, scale forever.
This is what iteration at its best looks like. Along with the system, it’s made you smarter. And then it hits you: the real shift was never technical. It was mental all along.
So next time someone says “AI is taking our jobs,” remind them:
You don’t lose your job to AI. You lose it to someone who uses it better.