The practical answer
Think in tasks, not job titles
A job is a bundle of tasks, and AI affects them unevenly. Nobody can tell you with certainty what happens to your title in five years, and anyone who claims to is guessing. What you can do today is list what you actually do in a week and sort it honestly.
- Highly exposed: drafting standard documents, summarizing, basic research, routine data work, first-pass analysis, formulaic communication.
- Partly exposed: planning, coordination, reviewing others' work, customer support with clear scripts.
- Least exposed: decisions with consequences, relationships and trust, negotiation, care, hands-on work, leading people, and taking responsibility when things go wrong.
If most of your week sits in the first group, the role will change soon. That is a signal to move, not a verdict.
What actually protects you
Protection does not come from avoiding the tools. It comes from being the person who uses them well and supplies what they cannot.
- Judgment: knowing which output is good, which is wrong, and which is risky.
- Context: understanding your customers, your organization, and its history.
- Accountability: being the person who signs off, and whose name means something.
- Relationships: trust that took years to build and cannot be generated.
- Range: combining a domain with AI fluency, which is rarer than either alone.
Practical moves for the next six months
- Learn one AI tool deeply, on your real work, until using it is unremarkable.
- Move toward the human parts of your role on purpose: ask for the client-facing work, the judgment calls, the coordination.
- Become the person on your team who shows others how to use the tools well. That visibility matters.
- Document your results in terms of outcomes, not hours, so your value is legible.
- Keep a live list of adjacent roles your skills could move into, and talk to people in them.
If your role is genuinely shrinking
Some roles will shrink, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. If you see it coming, the advantage is time. Use it to build a portfolio of proof, expand your network before you need it, and decide whether you want to move roles, move industries, or build something of your own. Reinvention is far easier from a position of strength than from a layoff.
Where people get stuck
- Reading predictions instead of experimenting. Fear grows in the abstract and shrinks with use.
- Refusing the tools on principle, which mostly hands the advantage to a colleague.
- Defining themselves by tasks that are clearly being automated.
- Hiding the work they do with AI, so nobody sees the new skill.
- Waiting for the organization to decide their future instead of shaping it.
I would write down my week in tasks, mark the ones a tool could do most of today, and try it on them this week. Then I would ask my manager for one piece of work that needs more judgment or more relationship than I currently own.
I would also have three conversations with people in roles I might grow into. Not because I am leaving, but because options are a form of safety.
A recommendation from Maasha Kah, not a guarantee. Your situation decides the order.