I talk to a lot of people who are quietly (or maybe not so quietly) freaking out about AI. Not in a dramatic “robots are coming for us” way. More like some deep “everyone seems to be moving on this and I don’t know where to start and I’m not sure how behind I already am,” energy. That feeling is real, but I also think it’s sending people in the wrong direction.
So let me share what I actually see, working with professionals every day who are trying to figure this out.
The Shift Is Already Happening, Whether You’re Participating or Not
Here’s the thing nobody’s saying out loud at work: your colleagues are probably already using AI. Just quietly, on their own, to get stuff done faster. McKinsey’s 2025 “Superagency in the Workplace” report found that employees are three times more likely than their leaders think to already be using generative AI for at least 30% of their daily work. Subtext: your boss probably has no idea how much this is already happening around them.
And while that gap between them and everyone else stays invisible for a while, it does eventually show up in output quality, who gets asked to lead things and who seems to always be one step ahead.
The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report projects 170 million new roles will be created alongside the 92 million displaced. I know those numbers can feel alarming, but here’s what I’d actually take from them: the labor market is in transformation, not freefall. The jobs that survive, and the new ones getting created, will look different because AI is handling some of what used to eat your time, freeing you up for the work that still requires a human.
What that means for your career specifically depends entirely on whether you’re in motion or still watching from the sideline.
What’s Actually Changing in Your Day-to-Day Work
Here’s the reframe I keep coming back to: your judgment is still the center of the work. What’s shifting is where in the process you apply it.
Think about the parts of your job that involve assembling information. Stuff like:
- Writing up a meeting summary
- Drafting a first version of a proposal
- Researching a vendor
- Building a presentation from scratch
- Compiling a weekly status report
AI can produce a workable first pass on all of those in minutes. Not a finished product. A first pass.
Which means you spend less time on production and more time on evaluation. Deciding whether the draft is right. Knowing what’s missing. Applying your specific knowledge of the client, the team, the history, the context that no AI has access to. Your judgment is still doing the work. You’re just applying it later in the process, and more deliberately.
I’d argue that’s actually a better use of your brain. But it does require a shift in how you think about your role.
The question I’d encourage you to sit with isn’t “will AI take my job.” It’s “what do I actually want this to do for me?” Those are very different questions, and only one of them has an answer you can act on today.
The Three Places AI Is Changing Your Work Right Now
In my experience, regardless of your role, the shift is showing up in three specific places:
The writing layer. If you produce written communication, reports, or documents (and most of us do), AI is changing how the first draft gets made. The question is whether you’re using that or still producing everything from scratch.
The research layer. Gathering background information, competitive context, and precedent used to eat real chunks of time. Claude, ChatGPT, and similar tools can compress that work substantially. What remains is your interpretation of what that information means for the specific decision you’re making. That part is still yours.
The preparation layer. Prepping for meetings, reviews, negotiations, or presentations involves assembling a lot of context quickly. That’s something AI does really well. The professionals who show up to those conversations more prepared, more quickly, are the ones who’ve figured out the assembly step.
None of this makes your job easier in a relaxing sense. It changes what hard means. The creative, relational, strategic work doesn’t get delegated to AI. The assembly work does. And honestly, good riddance to the assembly work.
What’s Not Changing
Your domain expertise is still your primary asset. Possibly more valuable than before, actually.
AI generates confident-sounding output. It doesn’t know your organization’s political dynamics, your client’s actual concerns, your team’s history with a particular approach, or what “good” looks like in your specific context. You do. That knowledge is what turns a generic AI output into something that actually works.
The people I work with who struggle most with AI are usually the ones who treat it like a magic box that should produce finished work. The ones who get the most out of it treat it more like a very fast, sometimes wrong, always-willing colleague who needs clear direction and honest feedback. Your expertise tells you when the output is trustworthy and when it needs to be pushed further. That’s not a small thing. That’s the job now.
What Starting Actually Looks Like (Hint: It’s Messier Than You Think)
I want to tell you about Tara, a member of our MVP Club community. She works at a university and came in excited to build a tool to help her department navigate a switch from quarters to semesters. She’s non-technical. She dove in anyway.
And almost immediately, she hit a wall. The curricular complexity turned out to be way bigger than she’d anticipated, way faster than she’d anticipated. She had to step back from building to rethink her whole approach. Her words: “I’m using Claude to help me think through solutions, but I’m not building anything yet.” She also mentioned she was eating chocolate and trying not to be demoralized.
I love this story. Not because it ends in a win (it isn’t yet, she’s still in it), but because it’s real. She didn’t wait until she had it figured out. She started, got stuck, used AI to think through the stuck part, and kept going. That’s what the actual path forward looks like. It’s not linear. It’s not a highlight reel. It’s someone working through something genuinely hard with a new tool, and staying in it anyway.
The One Thing I’d Tell You to Do This Week
Find one hour. Open Claude or ChatGPT. Tell it what your job is, what’s expected of you, and what’s eating the most time or causing the most friction right now. Then just have a brainstorming conversation about what might be possible.
Not “teach me how to use AI.” And definitely not watching demo after demo from an AI hype bro on YouTube. Just a conversation about your actual work.
I promise you’ll learn more from that one hour than from any article (including this one!) or report about AI’s impact on the workforce.
The Career Positioning Piece
AI capability is already showing up as a differentiator in performance reviews and promotion conversations. I’m seeing it as I talk to people in the community and just friends in general who are feeling the pressure. I’m also hearing it firsthand — in a recent conversation with a Chief People Officer at a tech company in Philadelphia, she said something to the effect of “the time to drag your feet on this is over.”
You don’t need to be an AI expert. You just need to have a real practice. The distinction matters more than people realize. A practitioner knows how to apply AI to their actual work. Most organizations right now desperately need practitioners, and most people in your immediate peer group aren’t there yet. That window won’t stay open forever.
You Don’t Have to Figure This Out Alone
AI’s impact on work is still being figured out in real time, and no one — and I mean NO ONE — knows the full answer to this. So I’m choosing to focus on what this means for my career versus the existential dread of “robots taking over.”
The people I see doing it fastest aren’t doing it alone. They’re comparing notes, sharing what worked and what didn’t, and practicing alongside other people who are navigating the same questions.
An idea for a path forward: organize a small group of peers at work and set aside an hour a week to share what’s working. Create a Slack channel where you can share in real time — including where you are stuck. Community really matters with this stuff.
That’s exactly what we’re building at MVP Club. If you want to figure out what AI actually means for your work alongside a community of people who are in it with you, come find us at mvpclub.ai/community.