AI Is Changing the Work. What Does That Mean for Your Value?

Every so often, a phrase takes hold in the world of work and we all start using it as though we’ve agreed exactly what it means. Future-proofing your career is one of those phrases for me.

I understand the appeal. Work is changing quickly, AI is moving at a pace that can feel slightly ridiculous, and many of us would like some reassurance that the skills we’ve spent years building aren’t suddenly going to become obsolete while we’re busy answering emails.

The difficulty is that none of us really knows what work will look like in five or ten years’ time. If only!

I’ve spent around 20 years working in financial services and I certainly wouldn’t have predicted some of the changes I’ve seen during that time. Roles have evolved, technology has changed how work gets done, whole areas of expertise have become more important, and things that once took a person hours can now happen in minutes.

So I’ve become much more interested in the idea of being future-ready.

For me, that means paying attention to how work is changing, continuing to build useful skills and, perhaps most importantly, getting curious about where our human value may become even more important as technology becomes more capable.

We’ve had this conversation before

One of my favourite examples comes from banking.

When cash machines became more widespread in the 60s and 70s, the logic seemed fairly obvious. If a machine could dispense cash, surely banks would need fewer people standing behind counters dispensing cash.

And yes, the technology did change the work. Tasks that had previously required a person could suddenly be automated.

But the role didn’t disappear in the neat way people envisioned. The mix of work changed. More of the human contribution moved towards customer relationships, dealing with more complicated needs, solving problems and helping people navigate decisions that couldn’t necessarily be dealt with by pressing a few buttons.

I find that useful when I hear some of the conversations we’re having about AI now.

I’m fascinated by what the technology can already do. I use AI myself, and I think there are plenty of tasks where it can save us time, help us organise information or give us a useful starting point.

At the same time, whenever technology gets better at doing one part of a job, I think it’s worth looking at the rest of the job with fresh eyes.

If something can be generated in seconds, perhaps the value shifts towards knowing whether it’s any good.

If information becomes easier to access, judgement about what to do with that information becomes more important.

If we can automate parts of communication, the ability to build genuine trust with another human being may become even more noticeable.

And if everyone has access to increasingly clever tools, the person who understands the context, spots the nuance, asks a better question or knows when the answer on the screen doesn’t quite make sense still has an enormous amount to contribute.

When the work changes, we can start wondering if we’re the problem

Changes in the way we work can do funny things to our confidence.

I’ve experienced that myself.

Earlier in my career, I received feedback after an issue that happened late on a Saturday night. The expectation, as I understood it afterwards, was that I should have stayed awake continuing to try to solve a problem that I genuinely didn’t believe I could solve at that point.

I was angry!!

Probably more angry than I would have been if the feedback had been about something fairly neutral, because being hardworking, committed and somebody who went above and beyond was a big part of how I saw myself professionally.

So it hit a nerve.

Once I’d had a little time to come down from my internal excuse me?!, I could look at it differently.

Was there something useful in the feedback? Had an expectation never been discussed? Was there something I wanted to handle differently next time? And equally, did I actually agree that answering emails indefinitely at 10 p.m. on a Saturday was the standard I wanted to establish for myself? Erm, no, no, 1000 times, no!

That experience taught me something I still come back to now. When our confidence wobbles, it’s worth checking what has actually changed before deciding we’ve somehow become less capable.

Sometimes we do have a skill gap. Of course we do. Nobody has reached the glorious stage of professional development where there is absolutely nothing left to learn.

But sometimes the context has changed.

Sometimes expectations have moved.

Sometimes we’re working with somebody whose style is completely different from the person before them.

Sometimes we’ve been given more responsibility without really noticing how much more we’re now carrying.

And sometimes we’re trying to do good work inside a completely different set of circumstances and wondering why it suddenly feels harder.

Being capable can hide how much you’re carrying

There’s another image I use a lot in my work: an invisible backpack.

Imagine coming into work every morning wearing a backpack filled with rocks. Other people can’t necessarily see it, particularly if you’re somebody who is known for being capable and getting things done, but you can certainly feel the weight.

Some of the rocks are obvious pieces of work. Others are less visible: uncertainty, expectations, relationships, decisions, supporting other people, worrying about getting something wrong, trying to work out what a change might mean for you.

The actual job is still there underneath all of that.

One of the strange things about being good at carrying something is that people can start assuming it isn’t particularly heavy.

We keep performing, so we decide we must be fine. Then we wonder why our confidence has dipped, why we’re more tired than usual or why something that previously felt easy suddenly takes more effort.

That’s another reason I’m cautious about career advice that amounts to “just keep adapting”.

Sometimes there really is a new skill to learn. Sometimes we also need to understand what the change is doing to the person who is expected to keep learning, performing and adapting while everything else carries on around them.

I’ve seen what prolonged uncertainty does to people

In summer 2009, I was working in financial services during a period when redundancies were hanging over the organisation for over a year. I had visibility of a spreadsheet where names moved on and off, and for roughly 18 months there was this background uncertainty about what was going to happen.

Eventually it happened.

Around 30% of the organisation was made redundant in one day.

What I remember most clearly isn’t a statistic. It’s the atmosphere.

People had worked there for years, sometimes decades. There were familiar faces everywhere, people who had built routines, relationships and entire chunks of their lives around that workplace. Then people started being called into rooms. And then they came back out and walked out the door for the final time.

And somehow the work continued.

There were still emails to answer, meetings happening and things that needed doing, even though somebody sitting a few desks away might have been wondering how they were going to tell their family that evening that they no longer had a job.

I think experiences like that are partly why I struggle with very polished conversations about resilience.

Change happens to actual people.

People who have mortgages and ambitions and confidence wobbles and good days and days when they’d quite like the organisation to stop transforming for approximately five minutes.

We can be performing well and still be affected by what’s happening around us.

We can be highly capable and still need time to work out what a change means.

And we can be excited about new technology while also having perfectly reasonable questions about what it means for our careers.

So what does being future-ready look like?

I don’t have a crystal ball, unfortunately. If I did, I suspect I’d be using it for something more lucrative. Am I right?!

What is changing in my work already?

Which tasks are becoming easier, faster or more automated?

Where are people still relying heavily on judgement, relationships, interpretation or context?

Which parts of my role seem to be becoming more important?

And where might I want to build capability now, while I still have the luxury of learning it before somebody urgently needs it by Friday?

Those questions can lead us towards technical skills. AI literacy, data, digital capability and specialist knowledge will continue to matter enormously.

They can also point us towards skills that sometimes get labelled “soft” even though there’s very little soft about using good judgement when the stakes are high, influencing somebody who disagrees with you, explaining something complicated clearly or building enough trust that somebody tells you what’s really going on.

The combination is where I think things become interesting.

You may have excellent technical expertise and realise that communicating it clearly is becoming increasingly important. You may be brilliant with people and recognise that stronger data literacy would make you much more effective. You may already have a strength that you’ve barely thought about because it comes naturally to you, only to discover that it becomes more valuable as other parts of the work change.

That feels much more manageable to me than trying to prepare for every possible version of the future.

Build future-ready skills before you urgently need them

There’s one final piece of this that I keep coming back to.

Most of us prefer learning when we have a little room to breathe.

It’s much more pleasant to become curious about a new skill because you can see that it may matter in six months than to discover at 9 a.m. on Monday that everybody assumes you already know how to do it.

Ask somebody how they approach something you’re curious about. Pay attention to a trend affecting your role. Volunteer for one piece of work that gives you different exposure. Ask for feedback. Use an existing strength more deliberately. Try an approved AI tool on an appropriate task and really examine what it produces rather than assuming the answer must be right because it arrived confidently and in beautifully formatted bullet points.

None of those things requires us to have our entire career mapped out.

My own career certainly hasn’t worked like that.

I couldn’t have predicted every change that has brought me from financial services, Executive Support, squiggle, squiggle, HR, squiggle, squiggle, and into coaching, training facilitation and building my own business. What I can see looking backwards is that very little of the experience was wasted.

Skills travelled with me.

Understanding people travelled with me.

Judgement travelled with me.

The ability to navigate change, sometimes rather imperfectly, travelled with me too.

And perhaps that’s why future-ready appeals to me more than future-proof.

There will always be things we can’t see coming.

What we can do is keep paying attention to what’s changing, stay curious about what that might ask of us, and become a little more intentional about the value we want to keep building.

The future can do whatever the future is going to do.

We’ll have more to work with when it gets here.