Will AI take over my job?

This is exactly the kind of sentence artificial intelligence cannot write. Not because it is such a brilliant opening line (although it is!), but because a human wrote it. A human, me, a writer with a style of my own.

See?

You feel it straight away. Yes, you, you can feel that this is human work.

That realisation alone shows how important it is to know what generative artificial intelligence is and how to work with it. Because then you understand what you can and cannot do with it.

I have been giving practical training sessions for almost a year now

The question I always get

In almost every training session, at almost every organisation, a hand goes up at some point. Usually a little hesitantly, sometimes with the urgency of someone who has been waiting a while for the answer that will settle it. I can secretly feel it coming. And yes, then comes the question: “Will AI take over my job?”

My answer is no. But I also mean yes. That is why I always add something: we will work differently. Let’s be honest, most people already work differently from, say, three years ago. We cannot go back. We already work alongside AI. Last month, when ChatGPT and Claude were down for an entire morning, I got messages from friends saying they “couldn’t work any more”.

Interesting, isn’t it?

The honest answer is that of course we do not know what the future holds. But the best answer is someone else’s. Professor Scott Galloway said in 2023: “AI won’t take your job. Someone using AI will.”

A people person

I am a people person. I love talking with participants during a training session. Sometimes I lose myself in a chat and a joke, but so be it, that is what makes me me. And I have more time to be myself because I let Claude, Copilot or Gemini do the chores.

An example?

I love doing interviews. I always have. But I used to spend hours afterwards typing out a recording. Earbuds in, press play, rewind, grumble about the follow-up questions I missed, and so on. Writing up the conversation took two or three times as long as the conversation itself. Now I have a finished transcript within minutes, thanks to AI. I go straight to the part I enjoy: writing. I bring the conversation to life. I guard the style, I choose which sentences deserve to stay, I can still hear the voice of the person across the table in the text. AI gives me time. What I do with that time is up to me.

That is what I mean by working differently. Working better.

Bad luck

And yes, sometimes that “working differently, working better” turns against me. I clearly remember handing in no fewer than fifty pages of SEO copy to a client at the end of 2025. Good work, a week of my life. A decent invoice, I can tell you. The client was very happy with it (obviously). A few days later he emailed to ask how I would summarise my own way of working and my texts in a prompt. That took a moment to swallow. Telling him off would not have been professional, so I suggested he feed my texts to ChatGPT and ask it to capture the style and form in a reusable prompt.

I never heard from that client again.

That hurts, yes. In the heart and in the wallet. But it is an honest story about where we stand. Things change. That client thought: I can “write” these texts myself now. Maybe he can. Not as well or as personally as I can, but good enough for him, and a lot cheaper. It earns him something. And just maybe he will eventually miss what he thought he could capture in a prompt: a voice of his own, the voice of his company.

A person can hope.

What does not fit in a prompt

The good news is that there is a limit. And that limit is not so much technical as substantive. AI does not know what you have been through. It has no idea why I think that one sentence is so good. It does not know your client, not the way you do. It has no taste. It does not know when it is spouting nonsense, when it hallucinates (which is why you need to stay sharp). And perhaps most important of all: it has no reputation at stake.

You do.

That is not even an argument against using AI. It is an argument for yourself. For the ideas you bring, your experience, judgement, style, your sense of what is right, for everything that does not fit in a prompt. Will AI take over your job? No. But if you do not learn to work with it, a colleague will do it for you. Or a competitor. Or a client.

You do not need to be a techie to work with AI. Almost every training session proves that again. Most participants get excited the moment they discover they can say what they need in plain language… and that it then simply happens. Not because AI is so clever, but because a language model asks for exactly what you have been doing for years: choosing the right words. You only need to be willing to look at how you work a little differently. Where does most of your time go? What do you do because it has always been done that way? What would you rather do with that time?

I now have a bit more time to drink coffee.

Coffee with people.