Why AI Won't Take Your Job

It’s a weird time to be online if you’re running a business. The headlines are that AI is coming for our jobs and our businesses. Everything is changing at a pace that is hard to keep up with.

Though the changes AI is enabling to our work are undeniable, I’ve been considering another angle. What are the non-AI opportunities that AI enables?

In this future where lots of jobs are automated away and we’re all super productive with the help of robots, what will life actually look like? And what will online businesses look like?

Here are my predictions about the non-AI opportunities that AI will enable for online businesses...

Human connection will become more valuable.

Historically, work has been a major way that we learn, form our personalities, and meet friends and romantic partners. As a society, in some ways, we’ve used the workplace as an excuse to build connections and have people to talk to every day. We’ve probably gotten more out of the structure of work than we are willing to admit.

Now that work is drastically changing and so many of our jobs can be done at home, with less and less interaction with our colleagues, our societal excuse for connecting will eventually need to be replaced.

Humans are wired for connection. We haven’t yet, and won’t evolve away from the biological need to connect with real humans, no matter how cute and smart our bots get.

Online businesses that can help us connect with others will be well-positioned to fill the gap office culture is leaving behind.

Teachers with unique content and facilitation skills will thrive.

AI will eventually be able to take great customized notes for students, summarize lessons, answer questions, and even submit assignments. Some have predicted that this will lead to a concentration of teachers. We’ll only need a handful of great teachers to teach the whole world math, for example.

I think this misunderstands what teaching is. Teaching is not just about the material and the performance of a lecture, it also requires empathy, human creativity, and intuition about a specific student’s needs. Those are qualities that AI can imitate, but not effectively replicate in a way that results in learning that sticks.

In learning communities that include courses, workshops, and guest lessons, it’s tempting to want to gradually reduce live synchronous interaction with students, in favor of a more customized learning environment curated by AI. In most cases, this is a mistake.

In an AI-dominated future, good teachers and small classes will still thrive both online and in person.

Demand for 1:1 and small group coaching will increase.

When chatbots were first a trend in like 2016, I built some both for fun and as a part of a productivity startup I started.

We were a productivity assistant, encouraging people to continue the work habits they set for themselves. Things like writing out your priorities for the following day.

• We experimented first with a virtual coach (me) who would remind and encourage users to stick to their habits.

• We also had a fully automated bot assistant that would do the same thing.

When it was a real person reaching out with the same words, people were much more likely to stick to their habits, by a lot. It mattered that someone took time out to reach out and in turn, they wanted to reciprocate that by taking action. Robots don’t care what we do one way or the other, and we know that.

Coaching is much more than reminding people to do a task, and even for that a coach couldn't be replaced. That experiment taught me a lot about what motivates humans to grow. Our innate drive to connect seems to help us learn about ourselves, stay motivated, and become the person we say we want to become.

This is the same in online businesses, especially coaching programs. Members are often joining because they want to be accountable for the vision they have for themselves (this is true even in very silly communities).

The act of being seen, by a coach and by the collective, helps us stay accountable. Bots can’t see us.

Online communities will be the portal for IRL connection.

When the internet first got going, for most people it was a place to enhance our real-life friendships. We had a place for inside jokes, sharing photos from a night out, and announcing and celebrating engagements, pregnancies, and new jobs to the people who knew us.

For a long time, most new relationships would still be formed in person and solidified online.

We are in the middle of a flip to this dynamic. I believe that long term, most new relationships will be formed online and solidified in person.

This is a huge opportunity. Facilitating real friendships online is something that online businesses are in a great position to do. We are already gathering people with very similar interests and life stages.

Thoughtfully designing online spaces that spark connection is a human skill that will continue to increase in value as AI penetrates more parts of our lives.

There is a lot of uncertainty around AI at the moment. There is so much up in the air from how to address biased data sets, inequality in access, loss of jobs, to how we can keep AI from becoming our overlords.

For me, the antidote to the whiplash of all of these scary possibilities, has been grounding into what only me, as a weird little complicated human can offer the world.

The above predictions are a guide to running an online business that survives by leaning into your humanity.