Navigating the AI disruption when you’re mid-career

Maybe I shouldn’t admit this on the internet, where it could live forever, but AI stresses me out. I worry about it taking over my job and everyone’s jobs. I worry about the environmental implications. And I also worry I’m not using it enough to stay relevant and employable for the next 20 or 30 more years I need to keep working.

My friend Ryland, a video editor in Portland, Oregon, feels similarly. We're just using first names so people could speak freely about how they're using AI at work.

“I have a hard time seeing it ending well for people in creative fields,” he said. “It definitely feels more likely to me that we're going to get automated away than this will become like an empowering tool.”

I called Ryland and a few other friends recently, because I was wondering if I was alone in feeling this way about AI coming along while we’re all mid-career. I was also wondering how much they’re really using AI at this point, if I’m as behind as I sometimes feel.

My friend, Maria, works in marketing at a multinational company in Miami, and she’s using AI a lot. For research and data analysis, and all sorts of other things. Partly because her company has been proactive about offering lots of training, resources, and tools.

“I'm not an AI enthusiast, right, like I wasn’t,” she said. “I'm one of these people who's very skeptical about AI for ethical reasons and stuff. But I have to say that in my day to day, it saves me tons of time.”

My friend Sarah, in Tucson, Arizona, is also using it, at the grocery store where she works in produce.

“It's not always the most profitable department, because it's perishable,” she said. “So there are huge margins for loss if you're not careful with ordering, or if imports are delayed and things like that. So it does help us figure out how much to order and how to display things effectively.”

My cousin Ian works in customer service for an airline at the Seattle airport. He’s not thinking about AI in the context of work much at all.

“I know it's being used behind the scenes a bit for some of the tasks we do to help with automating our boarding processes, our seat assignment tool, those kinds of things,” he said. “But personally, no, my job is a lot of customer interaction, so I don't really at this point feel the need for it in my day to day.”

My friend Zafrin, a college professor in Portland, Oregon, has started revamping some of her courses to incorporate AI. But she’s also worried about what could happen if AI eventually makes people less interested in going to college.

“If our students don't feel the need for higher education degrees and enrollment goes down enough, are we going to need as many faculty positions?” she said. “I'm still in my mid-40s, and so I still have a long way to go for my career, and so therefore… yeah, we’ll, you know… just see.”

I also have a long way to go in my career, and I’ve been feeling like I have no idea how to set myself up so I’ll still be competitive in an AI world. So I decided to call Jeff Baker, a career coach in Vancouver, Canada, who’s gone all-in on AI, helping people learn it and figure out how to adapt their careers, for about $100 an hour.

Talking with him made me a little less worried about AI taking over my job, even though I am currently stuck at what he considers to be “level one” of AI literacy, “which is using AI like a Google replacement.”

There is so much more I could be doing with it, he told me. Namely: learning how to create AI agents that effectively operate like digital people and work for me.

“Once you have a digital person that can think and plan and talk with you and create files and edit files,” he said, “then you kind of feel like, ‘Whoa, sky's the limit here.’”

In my case, it could maybe pull and analyze economic data, prepare background notes for an interview, or take a first pass at turning a radio script into a digital story.

Not many people are creating and using AI agents yet, so there is still time to learn, Baker said, “but there's not going to be time forever.”

The best thing to do is start, he said. Watch a few videos or online classes and then just play around. Maybe create one agent and see what it can do.

“At first, you're assigning very, very small tasks,” he said. “You know, ‘after a meeting, look up the meeting notes and just pull out my tasks and put them in my task list.’ Very, very simple tasks. But it slowly grows over months and years.”

Doing this can also help you better understand which parts of your particular job may be vulnerable to being taken over by AI and which parts may be less so.

“There's all these things that AI can do better. There's the things only I can do, and then there's the things that actually need to be done in collaboration with AI,” Baker said. “And that allows you to double down on the things that are uniquely human.”

Like, in my case, interviewing people, recording sound in the field, or making judgment calls about what stories to cover and how.

Still, he believes all of us are going to have to learn to pivot and adapt in the coming years if we want to stay employable, and we’ll probably have to keep doing it over and over.

“It's like we're all driving into the darkness, and some people can see 10 feet in front of them, and some can see 200 feet,” Baker said. The ones who can see 200 feet will be able to make better decisions about what direction to go.