Navigating AI & The Future of Work? Radical Preparation Is All You Need

This essay by Chris McLellan, Founder and Volunteer Producer at the Ask AI nonprofit, explores his personal journey of job displacement, discovering the potential of artificial intelligence, and encouraging others to get proactive in navigating the rapidly changing future of work.

TL;DR

Chris McLellan, Founder and volunteer content producer at the Ask AI nonprofit shares a firsthand perspective on the impact of AI technology on careers, emphasizing proactive preparation as the key to building resilience in a rapidly evolving job market.

Generative and agentic AI systems are disrupting nearly every industry, blue collar and white collar alike, and impacting the relative value of existing job skills. And things are moving at a unprecedented pace. For example, many early AI-related skills such as prompt writing and workflow design are being automated almost as fast as the workforce can learn them.

As a result, career-proofing in the age of AI will almost certainly depend on a level of foresight and levelling-up that will be a huge challenge for the broader workforce to adopt. These 'future skills' will include the following:

• Systems design

• Writing specifications and SOPs (aka 'Skills')

• Gathering and consolidating business requirements

• Identifying trends and opportunities from data

• Building dynamic knowledge bases

• Creative problem solving

• Program management

But as entry-level jobs start to shift from mastering applications and pricesses to designing and building systems, for example, where will people learn the fundamentals of their trade? In other words, without years of grinding away in the trenches, how will people learn "what good looks like"? This point is raised in the Ask AI Work Guide for Canada's Legal Profession, where AI systems are now automating many of the lower-value tasks that have traiditonally been used to nurture young lawyers.

8 Years and a Lifetime Ago

Back in 2016, I found myself at a career crossroads.

I had just been made redundant, along with all of my colleagues, off from a second startup in 7 years.

As I began looking for my next opportunity, I noticed that many of the job descriptions for marketing roles were incredibly complicated and expansive. Some postings listed so many skills and responsibilities that it seemed impossible for a small team, let alone an individual marketers, to handle them all.

Frustrated but determined to find a solution, I decided to dive deeper into marketing automation, which at the time was just starting to include an intriguing technology called 'machine learning'.

This technology promised more than just rules-based email blasts; it claimed to actually optimize entire performance marketing campaigns, from paid search to social media, entirely on its own.

The more demos I saw, the more I realized where this technology could go, specifically, the widespread automation of virtually any job that involves a high degree of sequencing and repetition.

The writing was on the wall, and rather than dismiss the signal, I decided to lean in further.

I figured I wouldn’t be the only one who wanted to keep up with such a sweeping shift, so I started a nonprofit, Ask AI, to host free events and produce a podcast with the goal of raising awareness.

But just as things were getting going, a team at Google (including Cohere co-founder Aidan Gomez) published a paper called "Attention Is All You Need".

This landmark research also heralded a critical point in the evolution of work.

The age of Generative AI was upon us. This meant that the marketing automation technology I had seen could not only optimize campaign operations, but start to write the ad copy as well.

The Augmentation Obsfucation

In the early days of Generative AI, the inescapable buzzword was “augmentation".

AI systems for the workplace, all of which had names that all sounded something like "copilot", were popping up everywhere, promising to assist rather than replace humans.

But as we've all experienced, Generative AI paved the way for AI Agents and autonomy, the slightly less happy-go-lucky cousin of augmentation.

AI agents, it seems, know no bounds. Blue-collar workers face the prospect of AI-powered robotics in factories, warehouses, farm fields, construction sites, and retail locations.

White-collar workers are seeing many of their core skills being replicated by agentic AI systems that excel at orchestrating and optimizing operational workflows. Even scientists, general practitioners, psychologists, and lawyers are not immune.

For every job that AI enhances or creates, others will be radically transformed, or disappear entirely. The net impact is uncertain, but from the human perspective, one thing is predictable: the household bills won’t stop arriving each month.

It’s one thing to talk about AI making jobs easier; it’s quite another to deal with the fact that it will cause many jobs and skills to disappear altogether.

Chose Your AI Adventure

As with any major technological shift, including the printing press, industrial revolution, electricity, or the automobile, people respond to the icnreased adoption of AI in different ways.

I see three broad categories of reaction:

• Do Nothings: Anecdotally, I suspect that a large percentage of people are resistant to AI, often for good reasons.

  
  

• Casual Adopters: The next group is comprised of people who test AI tools here and there, but outside the guardrails of a formal AI adoption strategy.

• Radical Preparers: Folks who are actively embracing the skills that will be needed to navigate disruption, whether through research, courses, or structured programs.

  
  

My sincere hope, and the primary mission of Ask AI, is to encourage people to join the third group as soon as possible.

The Future of Work? Human + AI Collaboration

To put all this in perspective, consider a couple of stats:

• According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2023, 83 million jobs are predicted to be displaced by 2027 while 69 million new roles may emerge—resulting in a net loss of 14 million jobs globally.

• A 2024 study by the Brookings Institution found that over 30% of workers could experience at least half of their job tasks impacted by generative AI, with approximately 85% of jobs having at least some tasks exposed to automation.

Successfully navigating AI doesn’t mean you have to hit the reset button on your career, but it does require that you to start to exlore the roles and skills of the future.

At Ask AI, we've started an open research project aimed at helping marketing teams in their AI transition, and this is just one example of the sort of activities that you can join to shift from passive observer to active contributor.

Skills To Help Turn AI To Your Advantage

Whether you’re operating machinery, managing a crew, teaching in a classroom, writing code, or managing programs in a corporate office, someone, somewhere, is exploring how to automate elements of your job.

The speed at which this disruption will occur depends on many factors, but in my opinion, the gains to be made in productivity and profit mean that things will change a lot faster than most people realize.

The purpose of this post is not to raise pannick or alarm bells, but issue a wake up call to people who are concerend about future-proofing their careers.

As someone who collaborates with AI systems on a daily basis, I'd like to suggest a few skills that can help to build career resilience in the face of increasing workplace automation:

• Systems Thinking: Analyzing how different parts of a process or organization fit together, so you can spot where AI makes sense, and where human input and governance is essential.

  
  

• Knowledge Management: Larning how to create dynamic knowledge bases as a core source of insights for strategic planning and decision-making.

  
  

• Robotics Integration: Aligning operational goals with the capabilities of robotic systems so the work gets done reliably and at scale.

  
  

• Requirements Gathering: Understanding what the business is trying to achieve and turning it into clear, workable instructions for the system.

  
  

• Communication: Translating complex ideas into simple explanations is invaluable, especially when bridging the gap between multiple teams, stakeholders, and AI systems.

  
  

• Problem-Solving: Stepping beyond routine tasks and thinking creatively about how humans and AI can collaborate to solve challenges faster and open up new opportunities.

  
  

• Project Management: Coordinating timelines, resources, and diverse teams (human and AI) to keep initiatives on track.

  
  

• Change Management: Guide your team or organization through AI adoption by addressing both practical and emotional hurdles.

• Resilience: Staying steady through change by adapting quickly and staying open to learning whatever the moment requires.

Strengthening these skills will set you apart for years to come. And if you happen to find yourself in charge of implementing AI projects, please be a champion for fairness, safety, and transparency.

Successfuly Navigating Artificial Intelligence

AI technology is evolving quickly, but there’s no shortage of free or affordable resources—online courses, webinars, and tools you can explore.

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is right now. - Chinese Proverb

Consider this post your invitation to make Ask AI a part of your journey of radical preparation:

• Stay Informed: Subscribe to our monthly newsletter or podcast to get insights, the latest trends, and free resources.

  
  

• Get Insights: Follow our AI Field Notes short video series to get knowledge, tips, and strategies for navigating AI in your industry or profession.

  
  

• Volunteer: Explore our volunteer roles and open research projects and support our misison to help people turn AI to their advantage.

I wish everyone the best of luck in navigating the opportunities and disruptions that come with AI transformation. By exchanging insights, we can all become better prepared to face the future of work.

If you haven't already begun your journey of radical preparation, start today!

Chris McLellan,

Founder & Volunteer Producer

Ask AI