Busted

Hello again, my friend,

Over the last two weeks, I’ve done a massive deep-dive into using AI for actual work. My employer, beehiiv, gave every employee a budget to pay for the top versions of these apps. The main one everyone is focused on is Claude. We’ve installed it on our computers, and given it access to complete tasks for us. We’ve graduated from “write me a reply to this message,” and copy/pasting, to replacing interns. I’ve used it to make an app. It’s done a huge chunk of work at my day job.

It’s vindication for people like me. The people who take on more than they can handle, who work hard (but could be more efficient), but may not always be the most organized as they race forward with dozens of tasks like a workhorse.

But it’s also shown how this is going to make people a lot of money. It’s also going to cost a lot of people their jobs. AI is about to expose millions of corporate workers across the world. AI is about to expose millions of corporate workers across the world. Busted.

Today, I’m sharing what will happen as corporate starts really using AI, and all of this hits maturity. For founders/leadership, for managers, and for employees.

If you’re looking for a job, this will show you what to worry about, what to work around, and how to position yourself at work.

If you’re worried about losing your job, it’ll cover everything I believe will matter in the next twelve months, no matter what position you’re in.

Let’s lock in.

The next twelve months of adopting AI will lead to difficult decisions.

At first, your life will get a lot easier. You won’t need to pester people for the information you want. AI will collect it, organize it, and even recommend how to act on it. It can dive deep on any subject you want, and even do the small tasks for you while you review everything. Getting set up and connected is not that hard at all. It’ll be an amazing next six months.

The difficult decisions won’t be around the data itself. Not at all. They will be on staffing. Like I covered a few weeks ago, companies are growing, but so is unemployment. They’re growing without hiring people (especially young, entry-level people). Many of them are growing while firing people (and not replacing them).

Employees you overlooked because they were “just” worker bees are probably going to look like superstars. Executives and managers who don’t do much except analyze data and tell people what to do will have to change (or go).

The limits you place on the managers under you, the boundaries you draw between teams, and the idea of a corporate ladder in the first place are all under question. How you respond (whether you lift these limits completely, partially, or not at all), will determine success or failure. The good or bad comes from how the decisions you make are less protected by the executive smokescreen as AI makes everything in the business more obvious to everyone.

You’ll have to just watch out that your vision and strategy (priorities) don’t get lost in the mix. You and your teams will build a ton of new stuff. But is it all actually useful? Is it just a bunch of stuff sitting on a shelf, or is there real value there? You’ll try not to slow people down, and may be tempted to let the wild west do its thing. But let it run wild for too long, and you’ll find that all this incredible technology didn’t make you any real money, and has been a fun hobby for a year.

Here’s the rundown:

I don’t envy you. In most cases, management is under the most pressure. Your hiring decisions are now (probably) the business’s biggest expense. AI adoption for you means difficult decisions as well, but also re-learning management from the ground-up in a way that fits this new reality.

All that corporate structure is about to fly out the window. You’ll have everything you need to run your team without fewer (if any) meetings. There probably shouldn’t be many conversations about “process” or “approvals.” The office will be helpful for in-person collaboration, but calling people into an office to sit at a desk (and not talk to anyone) is going to make you look like a joke.

The same processes that used to keep your team doing things correctly are now going to be what’s used to question your management.

You see where this is going.

But you also have an incredible opportunity. Imagine leading a team of six to adopt AI, use it properly, and suddenly complete the same amount of work as a team of fifty people without AI. It’s possible today and I am not exaggerating.

Here’s the rundown:

This is for me too btw.

I'm not writing this from some mountaintop. I'm in the trenches with you. I have a boss (who often reads my newsletters). I have deadlines. I have days where I'm juggling so many things that half of them are getting done at 80% instead of 100%. That's real life.

And here are the two biggest lessons I have to share so far:

If you're someone who understands the work, who knows what a good outcome looks like, who can look at a problem and break it into pieces, AI is about to become your unfair advantage. You'll move faster, produce more, and look like you leveled up overnight. That's what's happening for me. Not because I'm smarter, but because I already knew what needed to get done. Now I just have something that helps me do it at 3x the speed.

And as I mentioned before, if you’re a little unorganized but like to race forward, AI is about to become the team you never had to cover those gaps for you.

But if you've been coasting? If your main skill is looking busy, being in the right meetings, and restating what other people said in a slightly different way? There is nowhere to hide anymore. The work is about to speak for itself because the barrier between "I could do that" and "I did that" is almost gone. When everyone has the same tools, output becomes the only thing that matters.

Here's what I’ve done.

Stop hiding that I use AI. Seriously. The people trying to act like they did it all themselves are going to get caught in the dumbest way possible. Your manager will use the same tools and realize that thing you spent "three days" on takes forty-five minutes. Be upfront. The value isn't in pretending you're a genius, it's in showing that you know how to use every tool available to get results.

Don't use it to fake expertise. This is a trap. AI will give you a confident, articulate answer on something you know nothing about. And you'll be tempted to pass that off as your own insight in a meeting or a document. Don't. Because the moment someone asks a follow-up question, you're exposed. Use AI to learn things, not to pretend you know them. There's a massive difference.

Become the person who points AI at the right problems. Prompting is not the skill. Knowing what matters is a skill. Priorities and focus are essential. Anyone can ask AI to summarize a report. The person who says "here's the actual question we need answered, here's the context, and here's what a useful output looks like," that person is invaluable. That's judgment. AI doesn't have it. You do (or you don't).

Get comfortable with the fact that your role is going to change. Not disappear, change. The tasks you were hired to do two years ago might not exist in six months. That's not a threat, it's a heads up. The people who adapt to doing higher-value work with AI handling the grunt work will be fine. The people who cling to "but that's my job" when the job no longer needs a human? That's where it gets ugly.

And here's the part nobody wants to say out loud: the people who lose their jobs to AI won't all be bad employees. Some of them will be solid, reliable people who just didn't adapt fast enough. That's not fair. But it's what's coming.

I’ll level with you. When I wrote that post about how to keep a job, it exposed that I hadn’t been using AI the way I should. I felt anxious, nervous, and genuinely worried about losing my job. I locked myself away, downloaded and paid for all the apps, and worked all night to learn all this. I’m still learning, but I feel better.

The ones who survive won't necessarily be the most talented, they'll be the ones who moved first. We gotta move.

Here's the rundown:

I'm not going to pretend I have all the answers. Two weeks ago I was stressed out, staying up late, trying to catch up. But I moved. And I already feel the difference. That's all I'm asking you to do. Start now, figure it out as you go, and don't wait for someone to tell you it's okay.