Written by Denton Cockburn, Senior Partner, Technology Advisory & AI

There is a lot of talk about AI taking jobs. To be honest, I think that worry often reflects a lack of imagination. It’s a natural fear, but it misses the mark.

Your competition isn’t an AI agent. The biggest threat is people. Specifically, the people who quickly realize they can use AI to be better at their jobs will stay ahead of those who refuse to change. Those who adopt these tools will deliver increased productivity; those who don’t will simply become relatively less productive. That is where the real threat to job security lies.

The Imagination Gap

Right now, our generation is having a bit of a "lack of imagination" moment. We’re asking: "How do I use AI to replace this current process?" We should be asking: "How can I use AI to re-envision my business, and what new processes will I need to succeed?" Truthfully, this is where the next generation will shine. Think back to the cell phone revolution. Twenty-five years ago, we just wanted to make the same phone calls we always made, but while being mobile. Today, we have companies like Uber that thrive on use cases we couldn’t even imagine in the year 2000.

For our children’s generation, the internet, laptops, and AI are just "defaults." They don't see them as new; they see them as everyday tools. Their competition will be about who can think of the most innovative and disruptive ways to use them. As a result, jobs we can barely imagine today will become common.

Hope for the "Old Timers"

That said, our generation still has a lot of hope. As a Canadian technologist, I see it every day: COBOL code written in the 90s, and mainframes even older than that, still run a massive part of our economy and the North American financial sector.

There is still plenty for us "old timers" to do. Even as times change, old technologies that are essential keep chugging along. The ask for our generation is actually much smaller than the one facing the newcomers.

Humanity is Not for Outsourcing

I’ve said it before: I am not an advocate of outsourcing our brain, personality, or creativity to AI. Humanity is valuable and, frankly, special. It is vital to maintain our identity and voice even as we use AI to amplify our abilities.

We also need to remember that we’ve been integrating AI into our lives for at least 15 years without much fuss. It’s not all new hype.

• When Netflix tells you that you’ll love a movie - and you do? That was AI. When your car’s adaptive cruise control keeps you in your lane? That’s AI, too. Having an AI summarize a document or translate text shouldn't scare us. It’s just the next step.

The "Excel" Path

The field is moving rapidly. While simple activities are becoming more accessible, the learning curve for advanced AI is increasing. Think of it like Excel. It’s easy to use, but there is a steep curve to becoming a true expert.

There will be a massive difference between those who use AI to generate a poem and those who build agents to answer challenging business questions. If you want to be in the latter group, you need to start now so that the curve doesn't become too steep to climb later.

Where to Start?

AI tools are already everywhere. If you use a search engine, you’re likely already using the "new stuff."

• Use established models like Gemini, ChatGPT, or internal Enterprise models to assess or summarize documents.

• Use them to assess tone (since tone in text is notoriously hard for us humans to read correctly).

• Don’t leave free productivity wins on the table. Embrace these tools early and become the champion for them in your organization.

For the developers: the days of needing to understand "hyperparameter tuning" just to build a basic model are behind us. I recently demonstrated to some friends how I could build an AI agent that predicts when essential systems will break. It took under 30 minutes. I used an AI model to build an AI model that gave stakeholders insights that would normally take weeks to generate.