How Does AI Change Professional Life?

As a software engineer, I’m not the only professional grappling with how AI is transforming work life. AI is simultaneously performing tasks we used to perform and arriving as a new technology for us to utilise in a myriad of innovative ways.

Amidst this two-pronged shift, what are the tangible ways will we work with AI as professionals? It can feel easy to understand that things are changing, but what does this specifically mean day to day? Such questions can feel overwhelming given the multifaced nature of AI and broadness of AI as a topic.

With that in mind, let’s explore some specific professional activities and pathways being introduced by AI:

Achieving What You Once Did—But Faster

One pathway is to leverage AI to complete more of the work you once did, becoming a 5x, 10x, or even 100x professional. With AI handling the lower-level work, you’re free to concentrate on strategic, high-level responsibilities. According to Jevons’ paradox, when technology reduces production costs, demand increases. In this context, a more efficient version of yourself remains incredibly valuable.

Delivering AI Products

Another route is to integrate AI directly into the products you deliver. Consider using AI as a prompting and speaking interface to create more engaging user experiences. Or creating more advanced experiences from basic AI model building blocks: imagine on-demand radio programs that let customers customize their content—be it the news, social media highlights, or wakeup meditations. As professionals, we need to think strategically with these new paradigms and possibilities in mind when designing and building products.

Creating Customized AI

We may need to tailor off-the-shelf AI models by preparing prompts, datasets, scripts, or workflows to produce new AI behaviors. A basic example is creating business-specific chatbots to respond to customer queries. Alternatively, it might involve training AI models to generate art in a consistent fashion that aligns with your company’s brand.

Agent Design

AI agents can do things rather than just generate text and media. As professionals, we may need to work to embed our intellectual property into AI agents that can perform tasks for customers in the future. We might also work to bring such agents directly to market. AI agents represent an evolution of software as a service. For instance, account management software will likely be replaced by AI agents that handle all your accounting needs.

Expanding Professional Boundaries

With AI, it becomes easier to be effective in areas that might have been difficult to tackle previously. Businesses are likely to become leaner, with staff able to collaborate across professional boundaries more seamlessly and effectively. In essence, our tasks will broadly enable businesses rather than focus solely on the single role we once performed. Our responsibility for overall business success may become more direct than it was previously.

What Truly Changes with AI?

It can be difficult to grasp exactly what AI changes—and what remains constant. One key consideration is that, as professionals, the goal of the businesses or organizations we work for is generally to create and capture customer value. This goal does not change with AI; rather, how we achieve these goals changes and the types of value we can offer is evolving.

When we are freed from performing rudimentary tasks, we can shift our focus to higher-level aspects of achieving organizational goals and becoming more creative rather than merely executing low level tasks. There is a pragmatic aspect to all of this: we will have to learn to utilize these AI tools effectively to achieve our objectives.

As we transition into the AI paradigm, it’s essential to:

• Master AI Tools: Explore and understand the AI tools available to you so you can execute tasks more efficiently.
• Have a Higher-Level Focus: Learn to think about the entire organisational goals and product-market fit, as well as concentrating on creating and capturing value rather than just executing on tasks.

In this series, we’ll continue to explore the mindset shifts and tools that can help you navigate the exciting paradigm introduced by AI.