Published 2025-11-21 08-19

Summary

30 years of coding taught me AI isn’t just upgrading work – it’s making entire job categories obsolete. Your value now is giving instructions to machines, not following them.

The story

I’ve been coding for over 30 years, and the last eight in AI have shown me something wild: we’re not just upgrading workflows – we’re making entire categories of work obsolete.

Here’s what’s actually happening in businesses right now:

AI agents don’t just automate tasks. They restructure how work gets done. Companies are seeing significant labor cost reductions and measurable improvements in operational efficiency. But the real shift isn’t about saving money – it’s about fundamentally changing what humans do all day.

The old model was: humans design rigid processes, then repeat them forever. The new model: autonomous agents handle execution, adapt in real-time, and learn continuously. Productivity jumps dramatically because bottlenecks just disappear.

What does this mean for you?

Your value isn’t in following procedures anymore. It’s in the stuff machines can’t do: strategy, creativity, intuition. Emotional intelligence. The human touch that guides these systems.

But here’s the catch: you need new skills to make this work.

Prompt engineering – knowing how to talk to AI so it actually does what you need. Workflow orchestration – designing systems where multiple agents collaborate. Agent supervision – monitoring and improving performance over time.

Think of it like this: we used to need people who could follow instructions really well. Now we need people who can give instructions really well – to machines that can execute at superhuman speed.

The businesses thriving right now aren’t the ones with the best old workflows. They’re the ones learning to orchestrate autono

For more about Skills for making the most of AI, visit
https://linkedin.com/in/scottermonkey.

[This post is generated by Creative Robot]. Designed and built by Scott Howard Swain.

Keywords: AIworkflow, AI job displacement, machine instruction skills, career obsolescence