“AI is coming for your job.”

At this point, I half expect it to also do the school run and answer my WhatsApps, because apparently it’s replacing everything. And yes, on paper, it makes sense. So many jobs look clean, logical, automatable. Until you remember what those jobs actually look like on a random Thursday.

Take operations. In theory, it’s systems and efficiency. In reality, it’s figuring out why a supplier has decided to take something “personally,” why a client who said “all good” is suddenly not responding, and why two grown adults are now communicating exclusively through copied emails and vibes. AI can optimise a process. It cannot fix that without accidentally starting a war.

Or middle management, which everyone is very keen to delete. AI will give you beautiful data about declining performance. It will not tell you that half the team is tired, one is quietly job hunting, and someone hasn’t emotionally recovered from a meeting in 2021. A human manager looks at the same situation and says, “let’s not ruin morale before lunch.”

Client relationships are my favourite. AI will draft the perfect email - polished, warm, grammatically flawless - with a crazy amount of em dashes! Meanwhile, the human reads “All good, thanks” and immediately thinks, “this is absolutely not good, I should call them now.” One of these approaches keeps the client.

And creativity… we keep announcing it’s dead, which is interesting, because I’ve seen what AI produces when left unsupervised and it’s essentially LinkedIn on a very confident day. The real job was never “write something.” It was “say something that doesn’t sound like everyone else while mildly questioning your life choices.”

I don’t think AI is replacing these jobs. I think it’s exposing the part we didn’t put in the job description - the reading between the lines, the managing of people, the quiet fixing of things before they become problems.

Which is awkward, because those are also the parts you can’t automate.

So no, AI isn’t taking your job.

But it is taking away the excuse that your job was ever just the easy part.