The Great AI Job Disruption Has Started, Here Is How We Can Respond

For a start, encourage your child's entrepreneurial spirit so he or she can see how skills can be used to address a market opportunity

- Abel Ang

I recently witnessed back-to-back job disappointments. A former student, who aced her reference check, did not receive a job offer from the company interested in hiring her because its headquarters cut the job requisition at the last minute. The second case involved a mentee who had a job offer rescinded before he started his first day of work, despite the fact that he had already quit his previous job. The final disappointment was that of a general manager who was hitting all his numbers, but still got fired because the company decided that it did not need that position for the region any longer.

With disruptively innovative artificial intelligence (AI) agents being unleashed on the workplace, companies are radically reconsidering their talent and manpower needs and pruning accordingly. As a young man, I was invited to spend two days with the late Professor Clayton Christensen from Harvard Business School (HBS). That time with him changed the way I think about technology disruption.

I think Prof Christensen's innovator's dilemma is a useful way to think about human jobs in the coming years, with AI-related job disappointments increasingly becoming the norm. His theory—covered in his book The Innovator's Dilemma (1997)—is that when disruptive technologies appear on the horizon, the incumbents go upmarket, leaving the lower-end of the market to the new entrants. As the disruptive players improve their offerings, they gradually corner more of the market, eventually driving the established companies out of business, or at least leaving them severely weakened.

He used the steel industry to illustrate his theory. Traditionally, steel has been made in large integrated mills, with iron ore fed into large blast-fire furnaces to remove impurities and refine the raw material into steel. Traditional steel mills are costly to build, requiring billions of dollars of investment and years of planning and construction.