Ever since the advent of agents, there have been fears and theories of job loss. While many can claim the crystal ball, it is clear that this landscape is here and going to stay.
As I reflect on such inflection points, now and even earlier in my career, my mindspace has always been to stay curious, ride the wave, and shape it in your capacity and around you rather than wait for it to disrupt you.
Of the three lanes of AI adoption, enterprise and team need coordination with others. The personal lane is uniquely ours. It can be the most open ended, unhinged and creative of the three, and it stays with us wherever we go.
Personal here means you decide what to build and why. It can run through your day job or well outside it.
Here is a thinking model for it. Treat it as an investment and pay attention to the dividend.
The key is to recognize that building AI skills means different things for different people. In other words, what is your need and imagination as you look to embed AI in your personal rhythm. It is possible for some of you it could be more influenced by your work lane and that is ok.
For some of you it might mean AI augmented technical writing, an SLM based personal AI space, a research companion for a field you wanted to learn, an agent that helps your parents or your kid, or your own agentic home management system.
Once you have identified a work stream, then take your tasks and decompose them into logical units. Look at these tasks objectively. Some of these will stay with you. Some an agent can augment or replace. Some, over time, become an agentic flow you don't really touch anymore.
I would start small here and let trust and expertise build before expanding, since trust has many moving parts to it.
Next is synthesizing these agents into your own rhythm. This is where you become the confluence. The flows bring everything back to you, and you are the one adding the context, resolving what does not agree, deciding which risks actually matter and owning the recommendation.
In other words, think like a CEO, where judgement takes centrestage and not just task execution. Jobs of tomorrow will carry far more weight on the judgement side, and I suspect that is what separates folks who flourish in an AI native world.
As you iterate on various approaches, it is also important that you try and identify any differentiation which you can build on. I think of it as the elusive Super Power, always good to aspire for one.
Eventually these skills will start showing relevance in your work lane. When something works, keep it. These skills also help you stay close to, or take part in, conversations where you least expected to.
And then, with the time left, start building the next level of skills. That is the dividend. Building all this takes time and that is the investment, but when the next piece of work starts from what you already built instead of a blank page, some capacity comes back to you. Left alone it quietly disappears into more of the same. Directed, it can go into learning, into contributing at the team or enterprise level, and into the skills an agentic era will actually value.
The rhythm is yours to find. Some will build slowly and keep most of the work close, others will push more into the flows early. I don't think there is a right sequence here, only the question the dividend keeps asking: now that some capacity has come back, what is it for?
Stay curious. Stay hungry. Be your own frontier.