AI Won't Replace People. It Will Replace People Who Won't Adapt.
Will AI replace employees? AI won't replace people. AI will replace the people who aren't willing to adopt change, a new speed of work, a new mindset. Of the 40 content writers on one of my teams, one or two adapted. Thirty-eight didn't. Owners who deny what's coming will be left behind. Same for employees.
40 writers, 2 who adapted
At a home-services company where I ran operations, we had 40 content writers in the Philippines. They wrote our blogs and emails. Social posts too.
In 2023 we moved content to ChatGPT. After that, one or two people stayed. Their job became checking what ChatGPT wrote. They became approval gates.
Of 40 writers, one or two adapted, 38 didn't. That looks like the right statistic from what I see.
It's the same model I run now. My AI team works, I just approve.
So who adapts? Smart people. Smart means you adapt to change, you see opportunity where others see problems, you decide fast and you admit mistakes. Smart people will be in more demand. There aren't many of them, so fractional leadership will grow: one smart person running several companies at once.
What stays human
What stays human is decision-making and judgment. Sometimes it's just a gut feeling.
What made your company great in the first place doesn't go away: the grit, the consistency, the intuition.
AI is great where you need a deterministic answer: repetitive tasks, predictable models, given good data. If you want to know which of your processes fit that today, start with which processes AI can take over now.
More and more value moves into relationships between people. If all of your busy work is delegated, what best self can you be? Being great with other people.
Why now: the subsidy window
AI is heavily subsidized right now. My own usage: about $15K of Claude at API prices. I paid $400 for two Claude Max subscriptions. The model makers are buying the market.
That won't last. When token prices rise and companies have to reach profitability, there will be a pricing-point reckoning. Who can afford it?
Many companies will go out of business if they don't move to AI in time. Now is the moment. Use the subsidy window to take an intensive step forward.
What owners should do with it
Ask your team which processes repeat. If they're not written down, write them as SOPs. The SOP is the foundation for automation.
Keep a responsible person who owns the outcome. Give them the tools to add their own agents, but by the SOP. Pick the most repetitive, most time-consuming process and automate it together with that person. What took them hours now takes minutes, and they'll be grateful. Everyone agrees on how it should be done. That person becomes the approval gate, the way our one or two writers did.
The CEO's job is to guide and mentor, hire good people and help them. I believe that wholeheartedly. Writing SOPs together with your team, and helping them build an effective process, is what separates a good manager from a bad one.
Like any change management, it's going to be painful. Not everyone accepts the new mindset. Old mindsets are the hardest to change.
Where this goes
I'm optimistic about AI. Opportunistic, too. We'll move past consumerism and paying for hours, past factory-style work. The end state is abundance. We can actually be our best human selves: creative, kind, loving and caring. That's a society I want to live in.
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