Stop Worrying About AI Getting Better, and Start Obsessing About How You Can Get Better
AI is your enemy, a vicious adversary. It will run you over if you don’t fight back.
By Adam Hanft
The brutal reality is that today, AI is worse than it will ever be. As it improves, the employment picture will grow darker.
Goldman Sachs predicts that AI will cause 300 million jobs to vanish by 2030. This includes the full spectrum of human endeavor. At the “greatest risk of task replacement,” in Goldman’s view, is everything from administrative support positions, at 46 percent, followed by legal positions, at 46 percent, and jobs in architecture and engineering, of which 37 percent will be vaporized.
“Task replacement.” What an Orwellian euphemism for being made obsolete.
Does this surprise you? It doesn’t shock me.
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Indeed, I don’t think there is anyone who has used generative AI—to conjure a competitive analysis, write a marketing plan, a blog, or even as a thought-sparker to create advertising—who isn’t both blown away and threatened at the same time.
Especially if they recognize that they are merely working with the nursery school version.
Given that, I am amazed by how one-directional the AI conversation is.
Here’s what I mean: The discussion of AI’s devastating potential is rarely if ever counterpointed with a parallel conversation about how individuals must existentially improve to compete with it.
Just because AI is advancing, doesn’t mean we as individuals can’t advance along with it.
Somehow, though, conventional wisdom sees this as a zero-sum game: AI is getting smarter, and human beings are frozen in time.
Why are we taking this sitting down?
Why have we surrendered to a paralyzing inability to compete and just sit there licking our job-loss wounds as our co-pilots insidiously become our overlord?
Since businesses of all sizes are or will be contemplating how to do more with less, why aren’t those that are using AI—with stark recognition of its potential—relentlessly focused on successfully competing with it?
The intellectual framework for this is simple. When companies are threatened by new competitors, what do they do? The steps are clear. They relentlessly study the competition. They identify its weaknesses and develop ways to defend and counterattack based on that analysis. They double down on improving their core business. They work longer and harder to defend the franchise.
When individuals are threatened, they should do the same thing.
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That’s the simple message for those who are losing sleep over AI. They should dedicate themselves to not just defending against it, but demonstrating their superiority to it. That starts with the same disciplines that companies under attack have used successfully—here, for example, is a McKinsey piece titled “Getting into your competitor’s head.” A particularly ironic title in the context of artificial intelligence.
The particular beauty of competing with AI, though, is that you don’t have to guess what it’s thinking, like a business has to do with its sworn enemies. Whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Claude, it’s all transparent and immediately available. Take advantage of that gift. Probe it, study it, pull it apart forensically.
Ask it to draft a marketing plan, and compare it to the one you’ve written. The comparison may be a blow to your ego, but better that than being sidelined for copycat ChatGPT-ism.
Keep prompting the LLM to do better, and in turn keep pushing yourself to come up with fresher and more unexpected ideas, along with more imaginative and compelling ways to describe them. Demonstrate your superiority to AI in terms of both substance and style. The combination of both is what can differentiate you from the engine. Remember that much of business writing—whether a strategic plan, an insight-led market analysis, or an acquisition recommendation—is about how persuasive you can be.
AI doesn’t write persuasively; its linguistic limits, at least at this point, are programmed in, based on the engineered boredom in the world at large. AI recycles the clichés and tropes that are freely circulating, which is the Achilles heel of the LLM. Aristotle put it perfectly centuries ago when he wrote that “Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.”
If you want to succeed in an AI-first world, you must become a master of persuasion at a level the LLM cannot achieve.
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This same process holds no matter what your job entails. I’ve prompted all the generative AI models to create strategic briefs and advertising based on those briefs. The results are mediocre, but to be honest, no more deeply, boringly beige than what agencies charge umpteen millions for.
If you’re above average, you should be able to exceed the limits of AI since its output is based on the homogenization of that which already exists, a weighted dataset that favors the probabilistic. True creativity is outside those parameters. Eventually, AI may be able to break free of those constraints, but until then, it’s your edge.
Use it, in whatever field you are in. AI is getting better every day. So must you.
I can’t reinforce enough the degree of study, self-challenge, and self-awareness that is required against a ruthless, unstoppable opponent like AI. Chinese general and strategist—and author of The Art of War—Sun Tzu said it best, as usual:
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
There’s another benefit to becoming a fierce competitor to AI: You’ll simultaneously prove that you are better at outperforming AI than your peers. Meaning that they will be part of the 300 million incinerated jobs before you will.
Of course, employers have an essential role to play here, too. They must invest in the upskilling that’s required to give their teams the ability to take on an implacable foe. It’s not like the resources aren’t there—learning and development is currently an over-$400-billion industry. Imagine if only 10 percent of that money was allocated to non-obsolescence.
On the other hand, not to be conspiratorial, but would enterprises rather see AI colonize the workplace, even as they give lip service to the co-pilot paradigm? Employees are skeptical of their bosses’ motivations. Microsoft found that “52 percent of people who use AI at work are reluctant to admit using it for their most important tasks.” Similarly, “53 percent worry that it makes them look replaceable.’
As AI does more, those trepidatious percentages will soar.
Do you recall the famous folk legend about John Henry, the “steel-driving man” who competed against a steam-powered rock drill to see who could complete the job faster? Like many folk tales, it captures a pervasive social anxiety, with a grimly familiar message.
The legend is that John Henry won the race, “only to die in victory with a hammer in his hand as his heart gave out from stress.”
Let’s hope the saga of the American worker has a happier ending.