A friend of mine manages a department at a call center that handles bail bonds. Every Friday, she spends about two hours tracking down numbers scattered across multiple Excel files, pulling them into a single report. It’s tedious, mechanical, and completely automatable.
There’s a question your board is already asking, even if your leadership team isn’t: if AI makes every employee dramatically more productive, what do you need all those employees for?
When a client enters an AI engagement, they typically arrive in one of two ways. They know exactly what they want: a custom AI build, an automation, an agent. They’ve seen, read, or heard something. They have a spec in their head.
Every industry will be transformed by AI. Some will evolve. Others will disappear. New ones will be built from scratch. That’s not a prediction. It’s already in progress. The only question that matters now isn’t whether AI will reshape your business. It’s what position you’ll hold when it does.
I work with executives and founders on AI transformation. I sit in the boardrooms. I see the decks. I hear the talking points. And I’ve noticed a pattern: the more senior the room, the more comfortable everyone is with comfortable lies.
Not malicious lies. Comfortable ones. The kind you tell yourself when the alternative, actually confronting what’s happening, feels too disruptive, too uncertain, too threatening to the org chart you’ve spent years building.
There’s a conversation happening in boardrooms right now that goes something like this:
“Are we using AI?”
“Yes, absolutely. The team has ChatGPT.”
And everyone nods. Box checked. Initiative launched. Disruption avoided.
As of this moment, AI is not responsible for mass job displacement. It is somewhat responsible for hiring freezes and headcount reduction. They are two different things, but people feel it. A recent report by Anthropic on the labor-market impact of AI featured an image that generated significant buzz.
It shows the most exposed occupations and their theoretical vs observed AI coverage.
The image also shows that AI is far from reaching its theoretical capabilities.
Still, the question is worth asking: Will job displacement take decades?
The honest answer is: probably yes. But “slow” isn’t the same as “safe,” and that distinction matters more than most business leaders realize.
