The X-Shaped AI Economy

People keep asking me at the moment about whether or not AI is going to take their job.

Is AI going to replace me?

They say it with a chuckle, they say it with a smile. I don't think anyone really believes it. Certainly nobody wants to talk about it, or properly think about it.

The way I see it is, I believe the economy is X shaped.

Forgive my back of a beer mat diagram 👇

On one side of the X you've got physical work… we can ignore that for now, the robots are a little way off…

…and on the other side of the X you've got knowledge work.

Towards the top of the knowledge work side, I'd say 20% of the skills that are required to do your job are going to be enhanced by AI and make you, maybe,  50X more productive.

At the bottom you've got the other 80% of your knowledge based skill set…

… the value you bring with those skills, is going to ZERO as they are replaced by AI.

So we have an 80-20 split in what I’m calling the X shaped economy.

OK that sounds pretty disastrous, but you need to remember that your job isn't just one thing.  And this insight is how you go about future-proofing yourself.

Let's instead think about your role as a collection of skills and activities.

You are going to ZERO

For example; imagine that you are an SDR, you are in a sales team. There are a number of different things that you might do in any given day.

You might prospect your potential new clients, draft some emails, set up a call schedule, make some calls, do some follow-up on those calls, maybe you're preparing some kind of deck for a presentation, prepare a draft proposal after that and review that with your team, you're going to update the CRM, etc

There's a whole bunch of different activities that you do and skills that you have to be successful at your role.

So maybe there is 30 different things that you do within a given week. Maybe a few of those things; two, three, four right now could be significantly enhanced with the use of AI tooling and automation.

But it's not gonna stop there.

AI is never going to be as bad as this again.

Very, very soon 50, 60, 75% of all the tasks that you do are gonna be significantly enhanced by AI and are going to be AI driven.

So in the future, I want you to remember this one thing.

Your ability to manage the bots is going to be far more valuable than your ability to manage people.