Article
Will AI take my job?
On the sixth of June 2024, I was at the afterparty of the ZirconTech Summit, a gathering of Slovak e-commerce leaders, just outside Bratislava. I asked one of the attendees what he thought would be the biggest change in e-commerce over the next decade.
That person was Martin Volek, one of the first Google-certified trainers in Slovakia and a regular guest on Slovak business programmes.
He said: "Your profession will cease to exist. Don't let it weigh on you. But it will happen."
I went quiet. I do not remember what I said next. The conversation carried on. But I kept that sentence.
Martin saw a few things more clearly that evening than I did.
Two fears about AI: losing your job, or falling behind
What I see today is fear.
At Mixit, where I work as Head of Performance, and at events like that summit, I mostly run into two kinds of fear. Usually they come packaged with jokes. The kind of joking where you can hear the fear underneath.
The first is the fear of losing your job. People hear that AI will replace knowledge work, the things we do on a computer.
The second fear is felt, paradoxically, by those who are ahead with AI. They fear falling behind. Something important is slipping past them. A new model, a method someone came up with last week. They spend evenings and weekends trying to keep pace.
You cannot keep up with AI, and you do not need to
The fear of falling behind on AI has one simple source. The amount of AI content being published is more than anyone can read. A better summariser will not solve it. Even if some agent scraped and summarised everything, that summary still would not fit inside a normal life with work, sleep, and the time needed to actually apply anything.
Hours spent watching AI videos do not make you better at your job. What counts is whether you watch the thing that moves your work forward, and whether you apply it.
My own consumption of AI news is now nearly zero. Thirty minutes a day at most. What I have instead is access to people in Slovakia and Czechia whose businesses are built on applying AI and who know what actually works. I will learn more from five sentences with one of them than from ten YouTube videos.
I have stopped watching most AI influencers. They talk about short-term viral trends, not about how to actually apply things that make sense.
What changed over twenty-two months
My job title has not changed since the ZirconTech summit. But what I do during the day is ninety percent different.
In June 2024 I spent hours every week on manual data work. In April 2026 I do none of that. What I do is give feedback to agents when they make a bad call. My work has shifted up one level. I no longer do spreadsheet work by hand. I work with the reasoning of the system that works with the data.
It changed gradually and fairly quickly at the same time.
What delegating judgement to AI looks like
I have delegated more of my thinking than I ever thought possible. This is what Martin saw more clearly than I did. For example, when we are considering deploying a new intelligent feature on our company website, the model does the research, weighs the options (tools, costs, time, trade-offs), and puts them in a table, from which it picks the best option. I read the table and check whether the logic holds. The final call is still mine or someone from leadership. But the weighing and comparing is no longer mine.
In certain cases it has gone further.
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Summary
Common questions on this article's topic
Is my job safe from AI?
What jobs can AI not replace?
Will AI replace marketers?
How do I keep up with AI?
How do I stay relevant in the age of AI?
Is AI going to take my job?
If you have any thoughts, questions, or feedback, feel free to drop me a message at mail@richardgolian.com.
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