Recalibration
The work is changing under you.
You are still employed. You are still good at it. And you have started to notice that neither of those is deciding anything.
Who this is for
A man who is still employed, still good at his job, and has started to notice that neither of those facts is deciding anything.
Perhaps you watched a tool do something in four seconds that used to take you an afternoon, and you did not mention it to anyone. Perhaps somebody left and was not replaced. Perhaps the graduate intake quietly stopped. Perhaps nothing visible has happened at all and you simply know.
You are probably reading this at night, because saying it in daylight makes it real, and because at home it comes out sounding like panic.
Four things this site is about
The quiet part
What you have already seen, and why you have not said it out loud to anybody at work or at home.
Your own week
Not your industry. Not your job title. The actual tasks, in units small enough to think about.
This week
Five things small enough that you will genuinely do them before Sunday. None of them is a course.
While you are still paid
Being employed is the cheap time to move. It is also the time men waste, because nothing hurts yet.
Three things worth saying at the top
Nobody knows. Not the people publishing percentages, not the laboratories, not your chief executive. Anybody who gives you a figure for how many jobs go is guessing in a confident voice. You will not find a number on this site, and that is deliberate.
Something is knowable, and it is entirely yours. What you personally spend your hours on. Which of those specific tasks a machine already does adequately, today, not in theory. That is small, it is unglamorous, and it is the only solid ground available.
Waiting to be told is the expensive option. Companies do not announce this. The work is reorganised first and explained afterwards, usually to the people who are left.
What this site will not do
It will not tell you your job is safe, and it will not tell you your job is finished. Both are guesses dressed up as information, and men act on either one.
It will not give you a percentage, a timeline, a list of doomed occupations or a study to wave at your manager. It will not rank tools, sell you a course, write your CV, or tell you to resign.
And it will not tell you that this is an exciting opportunity. It may become one. Saying so now is an insult to what you are actually feeling.
Why this is written by a headhunter
James Roberts spent more than twenty years in travel and hospitality headhunting, running a firm of about twenty staff. That is a working life spent watching what companies actually do when the work changes: who gets quietly moved, who gets kept, who goes, and how long before anybody is told.
He is not an AI researcher and does not claim to be. He has no arrangement with any company that makes these tools. What he has is twenty years of watching the gap between what a company says is happening and what is already being arranged.
The vantage point, and where it stops is published, along with the rules this site is written under.
Talk it through
There is an AI guide on this site, and it says in its first line that it is an AI. Yes, that is strange on a site about your work being changed by AI. It is also the most honest demonstration available of what these systems are currently good and bad at, and it is useful at one in the morning when there is nobody to say this to.
It will not predict your industry and it will not reassure you. It is not monitored by a person. If what is happening has stopped being about work, the safety page is the right page.
The other doors
This is one site in a network of separate guides, each for a specific position rather than a broad subject. There are other guides for the man who is being made redundant right now, for the man being paid to sit at home through his notice, for men who have stopped drinking, and for men working on the physical body.
This one is for the period before any of that, while you are still inside the job and can still see the shape of what is coming.