Jobs Have Changed Forever (And More Than You Think)

Most people are asking the wrong question about AI and work. They ask, “Will AI take my job?” The better question is, “What is my job?”

My answer: something much bigger than it is today. I think people are badly underestimating how much jobs are going to change, especially the white-collar, sit-at-a-desk kind. Not a little. Not “I use Claude every day now.” The whole shape of the job.

I’m 63, and I run a large, AI-first venture firm. I’ve lived through real disruption: the personal computer, internet, smartphone, rise of the U.S. venture ecosystem. This one is bigger than all of them combined. And on balance, I think it’s great.

Here’s how I see it, in five parts.

1. Jobs are about to get broader. A lot broader.

For about 250 years, the story of work has been specialization. Adam Smith opens The Wealth of Nations with a pin factory. One man draws out the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts it, and so on down the line. Break the work into narrow pieces and output soars.

The modern office is the pin factory with cubicles, laptops, and a Bevi machine. One person does the creative, another buys the ads, a third analyzes the results. Everyone owns a few steps in the workflow. And to hold it all together, we built tons of meetings and layers of middle management, whose main job is moving information from one slice to the next.

Here’s the thing nobody says out loud: specialization was always a workaround. Human bandwidth was scarce, so we cut the work into slices small enough for one person to master. Then an entire SaaS industry grew up to serve the slices, one app per step.

AI nukes this. When a machine can do the narrow slice better, faster, and cheaper, the human job doesn’t shrink — it widens. You’re no longer the person who runs nine workflows. You’re the person responsible for the whole thing: the question, plan, judgment calls, quality, and customers on the other end. And when the slices collapse, a lot of the layers and meetings built to connect them collapse too. Nobody will miss those either.

That’s a much bigger job, and it takes a broader set of intelligences. Analytical, sure. But also emotional, social, creative, and practical. Most job descriptions I read today are still a list of eight workflows. They’re going to age like whole milk left in the fridge over vacation.

2. The liberal arts are back. Hire athletes, not resumes.

Every NFL fan has heard a GM say it on draft night: “We’re going to take the best available athlete.” You don’t draft for the exact hole on today’s roster because needs change, people get hurt, and a great athlete can learn a new position. A narrow specialist can’t.

That’s where hiring is headed. A resume is a list of skills someone has already learned. When the tools change every few months, that list depreciates fast. What compounds is the athlete underneath. How fast do you learn? How clearly do you think and communicate? Can you ask a good question? Do you have taste? Do people want to work with you? Are you a builder?

Which is why the liberal arts are going to come roaring back. For 20 years, we told kids to skip the history class and learn to code. Now the machine codes better than almost anyone. (Just listen to the world’s best coders.). I also think more and more kids and parents are going to embrace breaking the default of the four years of college after high school.

What AI can’t do nearly as well as people is decide what’s worth building, understand why people behave the way they do, persuade a skeptical room, or notice when an answer that sounds right is flat wrong. That’s history, philosophy, literature, psychology, and the classics. The old stuff turns out to be timeless.

For me, it’s not close. Give me the smart, hungry, AI-native person who actually ran something (club, team, side business) over the 10-year veteran who’s entitled and stuck in the past. And yes, I see the irony of a 63-year-old writing that. Age isn’t the issue; mindset is.

3. Everyone becomes an entrepreneur, a CEO, and a manager.

This is the part I don’t think most people have absorbed yet. In the new job, everyone wears three hats.

I live this every day. I run crews of AI agents alongside my human team: some draft, some research, some check the others’ work. I might be a better manager of the agents than of the humans on one day; other days, it’s the opposite. Managing each makes me better at managing the other.

Bottom line: the people who figure this out early and lean in are going to be astonishingly productive and successful.

4. Good riddance to the boring stuff.

Let’s be honest about what a lot of white-collar work actually is. Walk into the cubicle and open six SaaS apps. Copy numbers out of one system, paste them into another. Reconcile the spreadsheet, reformat the deck, update the status report nobody reads. Did you get the memo about the new cover sheets?

Office Space was a comedy in 1999. It was also a documentary.

That work is headed for the trash bin of history, and nobody will miss it. It was never the point of the job. It was the tax we paid to get to the point: creating value. When the tax goes away, what’s left is the good part: the customer conversations, creative ideas, tough calls, relationships, the things you got into this work to do. So the new paradigm for every individual, team, company and country: AI-first, AI-proof.

I’m not naïve about the transition. Some roles are mostly tax. The people in them will need to change or go find a company that hasn’t figured out yet that change is coming. (Good luck with that.) It will be hard for some of them, and it deserves real support, not a shrug. But I’d rather build a world that asks more of people than one that wastes them moving cells around a spreadsheet.

I’ve already seen this at my own company. When we redefined roles to lean forward, a few folks decided it was time to retire or go do something else. And almost always, they jumped backward, toward comfort and familiarity. I get it. I just don’t think backward is a safe place to stand anymore.

In this era, hard is good. More to come on this in a future piece. Look for it.

5. Denial, anger, grief. And then acceptance and eventually joy.

Every big tech disruption I’ve seen has met resistance — and this one will too. It’s going to look a lot like Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief:

People move through these stages at their own speed, and some very smart people are parked at the early ones. I was talking with a physician in my family recently, and his denial shocked me. I kept thinking: Doesn’t he see how much better his job could be? Doesn’t he know how much everyone hates the healthcare system the way it is?

The stages don’t change the outcome. They just change where you’re standing when the tsunami hits.

And to the stop-progress crowd: sorry, the genie is out of the bottle. The tech on my laptop is already powerful enough to change everything.

Like every technology shift before it, this one will create winners and losers all the way up the stack:

The gap between the leaders and the middle is going to widen at every level, and faster than people expect.

Where I come out

Jobs aren’t disappearing. They’re being redefined, and the new definition is bigger, broader, and more human than the old one.

If I were starting my career today (or restarting it at 63), here’s what I’d do:

At Alumni Ventures, we want every company we back to be AI-first and AI-proof. I’m increasingly convinced the same test applies to people.

The job you have today is not the job you’ll have in 18 months. That can be the scariest sentence in this post or the most exciting one. How do you read it?

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