Some of the most memorable moments of a career are also the toughest. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. When I started Marketri, I visited Barnes & Noble and purchased a book on how to set up my LLC and obtain my tax ID. There’s a sense of pride that comes with figuring stuff out the hard way. Learning from mistakes. Basking in wins big and small.
But what happens when all things in life become a big shortcut?
I recently chatted with the CEO of a large global packaging manufacturing company, who shared that she once became the CFO of a portfolio company in China without knowing any Mandarin. Those challenges—mostly language-related—became formative experiences that eventually propelled her to leadership in the U.S. When I started at a private equity firm in the late 1990s, I was thrown into real estate accounting, land development finance, and marketing for sock companies. No YouTube videos. No ChatGPT. Just me figuring it out.
We are now entering an era where generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) is fundamentally changing the landscape of knowledge work. The “leveling effect” is real, and it’s complex. Let’s examine what this means for various career paths and how organizations are adapting to this transformation.
The Great Leveling: Not All Careers Will Experience AI the Same Way
Think about the knowledge work legends—Peter Drucker, Amy Edmondson, and Steve Jobs. These individuals combined natural talent with unrelenting grit. Drucker practiced rigorous time tracking, aiming for over 1,000 creative hours annually. Jobs called associates at midnight to brainstorm ideas. They paid their dues through sacrifice and persistence.
However, in today’s world, an entry-level marketer can prompt an AI to produce a strategic framework that would previously have taken years of experience to develop. The technical specialist who spent a decade mastering a specific skill might find that Gen AI can perform 70 percent of their daily tasks. This “leveling” creates a multi-faceted impact:
For technical experts, it’s a challenge to their identity. Harvard Business School research indicates a 17 percent decrease in job postings for occupations prone to automation, while positions involving human-AI collaboration increased by 22 percent. Their expertise won’t disappear but will transform into what I call “AI conductorship”—knowing exactly when and how to leverage these tools.
For entrepreneurs, the barriers to entry are lowering. Someone with a spark of an idea but limited resources can leverage AI to create business plans, marketing materials, and even basic product designs without expensive talent. This democratization might create more diverse business founders—but will the satisfaction of building something remain as meaningful?
Creative professionals need to lean more into creativity and less into production. Many writers and graphic artists who don’t create original and exceptional work will be replaced. That could be a threat and at the same time, the new tools make designing and ideating easier so they can spend more time thinking and less time doing. The question isn’t just about job security—it’s about redefining their craft and finding fulfillment in higher-level creative direction rather than execution.
For entry-level workers, they face perhaps the greatest risk. Without deep knowledge or a unique skill set, how will they outcompete AI? The traditional career path of starting with routine tasks and gradually building expertise is being disrupted when those very entry-level tasks are what AI does best. This creates a paradoxical challenge: how do you develop experience when the stepping stones are disappearing? And without the opportunity to fail and succeed through those stepping stones, will careers become less meaningful in the future? After all, it’s often those early struggles that forge our professional identity and give us stories that define our careers.
Navigating Career Development in the AI Era
Whether you’re guiding a team or charting your own career path, here are approaches that can help navigate this shifting landscape:
- Develop AI literacy as a fundamental skill
Understanding AI’s capabilities, limitations, and ethical considerations is becoming essential across all roles. This isn’t just about technical training but about developing critical thinking around when and how to leverage these tools. Research from Microsoft shows that AI “power users” are 68 percent more likely to frequently experiment with different ways of using AI; in fact, experimentation is the number one predictor of successful adoption. These power users also experience notable benefits, using AI to analyze information (+51 percent), design visual content (+49 percent), interact with customers (+49 percent), and brainstorm or problem-solve (+37 percent) more effectively than their peers. Without deliberate literacy programs, organizations risk creating a growing gap between confident experimenters and those left behind, leading to lost productivity, resistance to change, and missed opportunities that compound over time.
- Assess your AI impact and development needs
Take time to reflect on:
- Which aspects of your role will likely be augmented or automated
- Where your unique human value lies in the AI ecosystem
- What skills do you need to develop to remain relevant
Some may need full career pivots, while others may simply need to learn how to transform their current expertise with AI as a collaborator. This shouldn’t be a one-time reflection but an ongoing evaluation.
- Find your path in human-AI collaboration
The most successful approaches to working with AI maintain human creative control:
- Using AI for rapid prototyping while reserving final decisions for humans
- Applying generative tools to overcome creative blocks, then diverging from AI suggestions
- Combining AI-generated concepts with human-curated emotional narratives
- Watch for the “box-checking” mindset
The easy availability of AI-generated content creates the temptation to shortcut critical thinking. Be wary of:
- Unusually rapid turnaround on complex problems
- Generic or formulaic approaches to unique challenges
- Lack of human perspective or emotional intelligence in work product
- Inability to articulate your thinking process
- Create technology-free thinking spaces
Some of the best innovation happens away from the keyboard. Consider carving out regular “analog sessions” for deep thinking:
- Whiteboard brainstorming sessions
- Walking meetings focused on strategic challenges
- Dedicated time for uninterrupted reflection
Then leverage AI afterward to accelerate the implementation of the human-generated ideas.
The Future: Not the End of Achievement, But Its Evolution
Will the next generation still feel the same level of accomplishment in their careers? I believe satisfaction will come from different sources, but it won’t disappear.
The pride of building something meaningful—whether a business, a breakthrough, or a brand—will remain powerful. But the journey will look different. The memorable challenges might come less from technical struggles and more from navigating complex human dynamics, ethical dilemmas, and strategic vision.
For organizations navigating this transformation, the objective isn’t to fight against the Gen AI tide but to help each person find their unique value within it. The workplaces that thrive won’t be those that resist AI or blindly embrace it, but those that thoughtfully integrate it while preserving what makes us fundamentally human: our creativity, our relationships, and our capacity for growth through challenges.
The question isn’t whether careers will still be satisfying—it’s how we redefine what satisfaction means in this new era.
