AI won’t replace you. It will change what you’re paid for

The scary headline is that AI will take your job. The honest version is more interesting, and more useful: AI is changing what you get paid for, and it’s doing it now, quietly, inside jobs that still have the same title they did last year.

For a long time, a lot of work was paid for in effort – the hours it took to write the draft, build the deck, comb the spreadsheet. When a tool can do the first draft of that in seconds, the effort stops being the valuable part.

Where the value goes

It moves up a level. To deciding what’s worth doing in the first place. To judging whether the output is actually good, or just plausible. To knowing your customer, your context, your taste – the things the model doesn’t have. Those become the paid skills.

The task got cheap. The judgment about the task got expensive.

This is not comforting if your value was entirely in the effort. It’s very good news if you’re willing to move up that level – and most people can, faster than they expect, once someone shows them how.