If that’s all you do in your work—wait around for someone above you to give you a task or a project—you won’t have a job for long.
If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you know my (rather frustrated) feelings on AI. But I can assure you that one thing it does well is take orders from your leaders.1 And it does so faster than you can.
But what it can’t do is take initiative. It can’t go out of its way to connect with your coworkers, managers, or customers and figure out what their problems are.
That’s where you have the advantage: you can be a problem-finder.
And problem finding is perhaps the most vital skill in business today. Because if you can identify the root cause of an issue, you can create a truly effective solution and solve it in a way that AI (probably) can’t.
That’s your differentiator in the AI-era workplace.
- Whether it executes on those orders with any sort of accuracy, reliability, or quality is another matter entirely. But it’s fast and (relatively) cheap, so you can bet people will use it. ↩︎
