“Lose your job to AI.” We have been hearing this, and will we face the eventuality?
This fearmongering feels like AI is someone who is coming to replace our jobs. However, we need to understand in a deeper context. You won’t lose your job to AI. You’ll lose it to someone using AI better than you.
In today’s workplace, performance is about how to deliver value at speed. It is no longer about who’s been around longer; it’s about who can deliver value faster, smarter, and with less friction. That person isn’t necessarily younger or more experienced; they simply could just be more digitally equipped.
For some Gen Xers, this shift could present both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is always in catching up while staying relevant.
Why You Don’t Lose Your Job to AI – Literally
To understand what’s truly at stake, we need to understand more about how AI is being applied. AI doesn’t walk into your office and take over your job. It doesn’t apply to roles, managing deadlines, or navigating office politics.
Rather, AI at its current state is like a tool and has the power to provide a multiplier effect. The current AI still depends on human ability to curate and judge decisions. Similar to the spreadsheet revolution of the early days, AI is the latest technology meant to augment, multiply, and deliver fast. Even with the promise of Agentic AI, it still feels like using a spreadsheet to replace paper calculation and analysis.
Moreover, most industries still rely heavily on emotional intelligence, strategic thinking, and interpersonal dynamics, and generally are still distinctly human. Hence, you don’t lose your job to AI literally. Also, as you know, without even using AI, people who use automation have already replaced repetitive jobs.
The answer could become clearer when we look at how people are using AI.
Why You Will Lose Your Job to People Using AI
The workplace game has changed. New customer demand is creating new business value. The demand for faster, agile, and responsive is the new customer expectations.
And as a result, businesses need to transform, to raise productivity and throughput to compete in today’s marketplace. Thus, by leveraging AI and automation, businesses will be able to deliver faster and better value.
Hence, it’s no longer about presence; it’s about productivity and throughput. And productivity and throughput today are increasingly enhanced and multiplied by AI. For instance, AI will solve productivity drag like repetitive tasks. Therefore, companies that empower the use of AI will be more productive and hence, competitive.
Furthermore, companies are also slowing down backfilling, a term used to describe hiring a replacement when someone leaves. Instead, they’re leveraging AI and seeking a productivity increase within the team: Who on the team can handle more, faster, and better, without additional cost?
The answer? The colleague who uses ChatGPT to empower ideation. The one who leverages AI chatbots to deliver industry presentations within hours vs days. The teammate who can analyze and visualize large, chaotic data effortlessly.
Your coworker simply becomes smarter with their AI tools! In short, the AI-powered employees are producing more and much faster. They are delivering better value that aligns with the new business goals.
Lose your job to AI? That is, if you are not able to use AI to empower your task, you risk being replaced!
How am I using AI?
Personally, an AI chatbot is a big part of my day-to-day productivity. Here’s how I use them:
- Ideation – AI chatbot is great at ideation. I need ideas for design, creation, event theme, and business ideas for improvement. I brainstorm with an AI chatbot every day.
- Presentation prep – It is not literally a one-prompt-generated PPT slide deck. Rather, the ideation, the storytelling flow, the presentation framework, and the research. This usage has the biggest impact on my productivity.
- Invitation Script – it is very helpful to craft an invitation script for email, webinar invite, calling script and etc. It saves a lot of time.
- AI image – You turn to an AI image generator when the regular stock photo does not support the expression you want.
- Whitepaper – This is a great tool for research. It has helped to extract insights effortlessly from whitepapers.
In all of these cases, it’s not AI doing the job. It’s people like me who use AI to multiply my own productivity!
The Gen X Wake-Up Call: Experience Isn’t Enough Anymore
As a Gen Xer, I feel experience is no longer enough. We have to accept this.
Although we are ingrained in values like hard work and time-earned wisdom, these traits still matter, but today’s economy favors people with digital leverage. That is, the ability to get results faster using smarter tools.
Lose your job to AI? We may be losing to people using AI!
Hence, the option out there is clear: either we transform or we are left behind. Because, ultimately, businesses will be forced to transform to compete. And they will rebuild a team that is digital and AI-ready.
Fortunately, as long as we continue to stay curious and willing to try and experiment, learning how to use AI effectively is totally feasible. (As an example, I am now quite savvy when compared to my younger colleagues!)
What You Can Do – Starting This Week
You can start to train yourself in using AI effectively. Here are some of the tools that I have tried and experimented.
✅ Explore AI Tools Relevant to Your Job:
- ChatGPT– Brainstorming, ideation, content outline, and planning
- Perplexity – For fact-checking and verifying information sources
- Deepseek – Use Deepseek to cross-research and compare notes with ChatGPT
- Ideagram – Use ideagram to generate an AI image or an image for AI video generation
- Hailuo/Kling AI – Use hailuo/Kling AI for video generation
- Adobe PDF AI – Use Adobe PDF AI to help read whitepapers
✅ Start a Micro-Habit Today:
Install ChatGPT, Perplexity or DeepSeek mobile apps. They are my brainstorming pals on the go. When I am traveling, I constantly perform ideation on the go. It helps to stimulate my mind and creativity.
Final Thoughts: Lose Your Job to AI
As new business value evolves, businesses need to transform. So do the workplace. The writing is clearly on the wall: You don’t lose your job to AI. You lose it to people using AI.
The good news? You can become one of those people using AI, starting now.
As a Gen Xer, we can keep things simple. Just keep looking at how to make your work faster and deliver better value. And how can AI help you?
We just need to stay adaptive, be open to AI tools that make us faster, sharper, and more productive. Because the future won’t reward the most senior person in the room. It will reward the person who is well-equipped with the tools!
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