Employees looking to build successful careers in a post-AI world need to develop and deliver net new knowledge and center themselves on solving pressing business problems to elevate their value and contributions.
As they evolve, employees need to ensure they are operating as both radical learners (of AI and other new skills) and radical unlearners (leaving obsolete skills and practices behind). Those are key takeaways from” How to Have a Legendary Career in a Post-AI World,” a keynote fireside chat featuring Christoper Lochhead. The best-selling author and leading business podcaster was speaking with Cloud Wars founder Bob Evans and Dynamic Communities/Cloud Wars CEO John Siefert during the opening keynote at AI Agent & Copilot Summit Monday.
“We believe there’s a new rung on the ladder… and the people who apply existing knowledge are in a lot of trouble. The people who can create net new on an ongoing basis and capitalize on the things that they create often, if not always, using AI are going to win,” Lochhead said.
Existing vs. Net New Knowledge
With the volume of data and knowledge now being housed in AI models, “the value of existing knowledge gets closer to zero every day,” Lochhead said. By way of example, he cited a consulting firm that lost a senior leader but didn’t see the need to replace that individual because so much of their knowledge, experience, customer engagement detail, writing, and more are captured in a large language model.
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That may not bode well for consulting firms: Lochhead said if he worked in a large management consulting firm, “I’d be thinking about how to get rid of two-thirds of my people with AI.”
Lochhead and Evans noted that such examples point to two necessities. First, people need to have the courage to accept that the way things worked before — such as relying on existing knowledge and ways of the past — won’t work going forward.
Second, companies such as those in the software industry need to approach problems and product development from a different perspective. Many companies look to maintain existing products and add AI functionality alongside them, then join the existing and new together and think that’s an awesome solution…“until an AI startup puts you out of business.”
Here’s what startups do differently: They take on problems that were either unacknowledged or unsolvable in the past, and they start with AI at the core. “So AI is the app; AI is the business, the story,” Lochhead said.
Career Development
Lochhead shared indicators of how different things are today for employees, employers, and careers in the AI era. His firm’s research forecasts that we’re at most 36 months away from the first one-person company with a $1 billion value. Another indicator: English is the new programming language and “We’re not far off from people not being taught to code but being taught to prompt to code.”
How does he recommend individuals manage and grow careers in this AI-centric era?
They need to start by “unshackling” themselves from old ways of doing things that no longer apply — or becoming radical unlearners. They should take inventory of the value they’ve created — net new things they’ve created alone or with others. And many individuals will find in this process they’re more creative than they think. Then they should center their career on a set of problem areas want to be known for solving, with AI at the core of solving those.
Evans followed this commentary by noting the opportunities to be a creator capitalist inside a company will be unlike anything we’ve seen until now — but individuals must start working on that process now, not wait for a directive or one-time event to stimulate change. For companies, those that don’t adapt to the changes wrought by AI will get “savaged” by an exodus of talented employees who do want to evolve, he added.
Lochhead and Evans agreed there’s tremendous reason for optimism. “I’m glad I’m alive for this. It’s the greatest time in history to be a human being,” Lochhead said.
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