July 30, 2026 · by David Gilbert · 3 min read · Tech & AI
This question comes up in almost every talk I give and a fair few radio segments too: "should I be worried about AI taking my job?" People generally want one of two answers — confident reassurance, or validation of their fear. The honest answer is more complicated than either, and I think the complicated version is actually more useful to sit with.
The Short, Unsatisfying Answer
It depends heavily on what your job actually involves day to day, not what your job title says. This isn't a dodge — it's the genuinely accurate answer, and anyone giving you a confident, universal yes or no probably hasn't thought it through carefully enough, or is selling you something off the back of whichever answer sounds better.
What's Genuinely at Risk
Tasks that are repetitive, well-defined, and don't require much specific context about an individual person or situation are the most exposed, and that's already visibly happening in plenty of industries. Drafting generic content. Answering frequently repeated customer questions. Routine data entry and basic categorisation work. If a meaningful chunk of your role is exactly this, that part of the job is genuinely changing, and pretending otherwise doesn't actually help you prepare for it.
What's Genuinely Not at Risk, At Least for Now
Anything requiring real judgement about a specific, unique situation. Anything depending on accumulated trust and relationship built over actual time. Anything needing hands-on physical skill in an unpredictable, real-world environment — which describes a fair chunk of my own repair work, where every device that comes in has its own specific history and damage pattern that AI can't physically diagnose or fix. Anything where the human connection genuinely is the actual point, not just an inconvenient delivery mechanism for some other value.
The Bit Most Discussions Skip Entirely
It's rarely "AI replaces a job" in one clean, total step. It's much more often "AI changes what the job actually involves," shifting the balance of someone's time and value toward the parts a tool genuinely can't do well. I've watched this happen in my own work — I do less manual drafting than I used to and more reviewing, judgement, and client-specific context than before. The job didn't disappear. It quietly reshaped around what I'm actually still needed for.
What I'd Actually Do If I Were Worried
Honestly assess which parts of your specific role are repetitive and well-defined versus which parts depend on judgement, relationship, and context that's specific to you and your situation. Get genuinely comfortable using the tools yourself, rather than avoiding them out of unease, because understanding a tool's actual limitations firsthand is far more reassuring, and far more useful for adapting, than either blind fear or blind faith from a distance. And lean harder into whatever part of your work depends on people actually trusting and knowing you specifically — that part is, for now, holding up the best across pretty much every industry I'm seeing this play out in.
The Honest Bottom Line
Some jobs and tasks are genuinely changing, and a few will likely disappear in their current recognisable form. Most jobs are reshaping around the parts that genuinely need a person, rather than vanishing outright. I don't think blind reassurance or blind panic serves anyone well here. A clear, honest look at what you actually do, and which parts of it depend on something AI genuinely can't replicate yet, is a far more useful way to spend the worry than either extreme.