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After automation

As AI automates more of today’s tasks, there will be more ambitious, expert human work to do than ever. Here, builders, operators, and thinkers offer their predictions for what work after automation could look like.

After automation

100 predictions on what happens to work

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Alex Komoroske

CEO and cofounder, Common Tools

Software will work for you, not on you

AI promises “infinite software”—endless tools tailored to every need—but funneled through today's app stores, that abundance just means more silos, more trapped data, and more to orchestrate.

100 predictions on what happens to work

Software will work for you, not on you

Some of your hardest problems will solve themselves

There will be more human work than ever

Answers will become abundant and questions will become the hard part

Computational thinking will come for your job

Your attention will be handed back to you. Don't waste it

AI's biggest problem will be design

Boring infrastructure will win

Wisdom work will replace knowledge work

The jobs AI can't do will scale

Software will work for you, not on you

AI will spur a resistance to mediocre ideas

Founders who AI-ify existing workflows will lose

The company with the best clock will beat the company with the best model

'Good enough' will beat artificial general intelligence

You'll need to know which bets on AI are reversible

The people declaring 'Work is solved' will still be working

Regulating our nervous systems will become part of work

Our competitive advantage will come from playing golf and being the funniest person in the room

Your job title will stop meaning anything

Software companies will outperform software factories

Weirdness will be the best human advantage

Seeking productive friction will lead to your biggest successes

Aged intelligence will be worth more than artificial intelligence

AI will be a whole new storytelling medium

The jobs AI won't touch will be the ones where excellence is visible, and matters

The minimum viable product will be for one person—or even one agent

Offline devices will be like going to the gym for your brain

To work with AI, we'll grow new senses

The best businesses will use AI to revolutionize their companies, not automate them

The best leaders will focus on the messy work of unpredictable humans

The AI revolution will take so much longer than anyone is predicting

Your AI tools will feel like part of your body

Our work will be discovering the destination, not optimizing the route

You will be paid for what you can feel but can't explain

Art school will be the best training for technical work

Progress will be measured by the depth of human wisdom

AI will introduce a lower floor and a higher ceiling for excellence

The more human AI feels, the more real human time will be worth

AI will become a mise en place for the mind

Every good idea will have 1,000 clones by morning

When AI can argue for anything, trust your gut

We'll move from a knowledge economy to a discovery economy

We'll pay to watch humans make things

Institutions won't need a crisis to change

Certainty will be the trap

'Powered by AI' will mean cheap

Technical competence will yield to people skills

How to do something will stop being our identity

Good design will signal mediocrity

A faster version of average is still average

The risk won't be bad execution—it'll be endless execution

AI will make uncertainty cheap to explore without making it cheap to resolve

The time spent in the details is an investment in having the next good idea

AI will have rules, but those rules will constantly be shifting

Intelligence will live in your pocket, not a data center

Every token will be connected to a budget, an owner, or an outcome

We'll be assessed on what we can defend, not what we can produce

We'll stop designing processes around human limits

'Maybe someday' will become 'start now'

Unmeasurable work will stop being a luxury

Intelligence will be abundant. Organizational intelligence won't

Our own work will become our most valuable curriculum

Your agent will know what you want. That won't mean it's working only for you

Most people will use AI to do their jobs, not reinvent them

Automating the numbers will be easy—making them trustworthy won't

You'll give your Legos away to agents

Describing a problem will be enough to begin solving it

Managing decision fatigue will become part of making great work

Nothing will go wrong twice

History will be rendered, not read

Your expertise will belong to your employer—unless you can make it portable

The arguments we hid behind shared vocabulary will become explicit

We'll follow people for their stories, not their expertise

The only thing that can free us from algorithms will be our own

Editing will become a creative act

The best way to keep your job is to be the one who automates it

AI will join the writers' room, not replace it

The only real programming language will be English