Career Risk & Leverage
Reality Check: Career Risk and Leverage
Using AI agents well requires honesty about where your current value comes from.
The uncomfortable truth
If most of your daily work is mechanical — gathering, filtering, reformatting, routing, summarizing — then large parts of your role will be compressed by AI. Not in ten years. In the next 12–48 months.
This is not a panic signal. It is a direction signal. It tells you exactly where to invest.
The three-part response
1. Systematize the mechanical work now. Do not wait for your company to automate your role. Build the systems yourself. You will be the person who understands both the work and the system — and that is more valuable than someone who just does the work.
2. Shift your time toward judgment-heavy work. Volunteer for projects that require prioritization, strategy, client relationships, creative problem-solving, and decision-making under uncertainty. These are the capabilities that do not compress into simple rules.
3. Build domain expertise that makes your judgment harder to replace. Deep understanding of your industry, your clients, and your organization makes your recommendations valuable in a way no generic agent can match.
Run your personal value audit
Review your last two weeks. Tag each activity:
- Mechanical: Repeatable, rules-based, low judgment.
- Judgment: Prioritization, tradeoffs, decisions under uncertainty.
- Creative: New ideas, problem framing, narrative, synthesis.
- Relational: Influence, trust, alignment, conflict resolution.
- Strategic: Long-term direction, resource allocation, bets.
Then honestly ask:
- What percentage of your time is mechanical?
- Which activities create the highest impact?
- What would you do with 10 extra hours per week?
The compounding advantage
People who build agent workflows early get a double benefit:
- Immediate: They free up time and produce more consistent output.
- Compounding: Their systems improve over time. Their workflows accumulate knowledge. Their judgment gets applied to higher-value work, which builds stronger expertise and reputation.
People who wait get a different outcome: their mechanical work gets automated by someone else's system, and they are left without the workflows, the skills, or the repositioned value.
Start now.